A thoughtful compilation of works about inspiration and growing older.
Parihar presents a brief collection of poetry on the anxieties of time, creativity, and authenticity.
This book of 13 poems opens with an empath’s lament. “The Tragedy of a Sensitive Heart” illustrates the burden of being “sad in anyone’s sorrow and happy in anyone’s joy.” This sets the conscious, sensitive tone of the rest of the collection, with its deep ruminations on time and its inevitable passing, and on how what’s behind us often distracts from what’s to come. In “A Preoccupied Man,” readers meet a man who’s “never available / He desired to live in the moment,” but “Moments passed as they always do, / There wasn’t much he can do.” However, in “The Past,” another man is willing to kick down a door and face the past, present, and future for a temporal do-over. The poems broadly address loss, often pondering existential questions instead of telling specific stories, yet several note the regrets of a creative person striving for motivation. “A Poem of Instructions” combines these themes: “How to pass the test of time? / ….one needs to…find new inspirations.” Other poems lament spending energy on the inauthentic and the accumulation of worldly things. Parihar’s stanzas make heavy use of repetition, driving home each entry’s point with little ambiguity. Combined with the book’s overall pithiness, these encores in verse make the already sparse collection feel light, approachable, and easy to revisit. The poems’ order is subtly impressive; although nearly all share the theme of time passing, there are smaller connections, as well: “Anxieties” and “The Autumn Leaves,” for instance, share a preoccupation with nature—in the former, it’s distracting; in the latter, it’s decaying. This approach keeps any single entry from feeling like a non sequitur. The lone exception to this, though, is stylistic, not thematic: The book’s finale, “Deep down in my heart,” abandons the free verse that dominates the collection for a lyrical, sprinting composition—a stark contrast to the poet’s more meditative approach.
A thoughtful compilation of works about inspiration and growing older.Pub Date: Nov. 23, 2023
ISBN: 9798869719966
Page Count: 33
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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