paper 1-880238-76-4 Enjoyable and important reading on the life of the Pulitzer-winning poet (for Heart’s Needle) who made autobiography an art form by founding the “confessional” school. This collection of thematic more than chronological autobiographical pieces demonstrates that Snodgrass can turn his problematic interior life into enduring prose as well as poetry. In a hilarious opening chapter entitled “Good Housekeeping,” he explains how a large, wealthy home in industrial Beaver Falls, Penn., could have created so much craziness and creativity. His mother “could keep a grudge better than anyone I’ve ever known,” but she couldn’t keep house. She crammed every cranny with soon broken cheap furniture and collectibles, noisy TVs and radios, filthy cats and dogs, and years of old newspapers and magazines. The pollution inside and out (“balls of greasy soot and grit, like peppercorns, had settled on the sills’) becomes more serious when his sister dies of asthma at 25. The author’s mother taught classics and belonged to Daughters of the American Revolution, while his father was a CPA whose womanizing fanned conflicts at home and who wanted his son to give up poetry. “Don—t you see that you—ll never amount to a hill of beans with this sort of thing,” he asks. Weeks later, Snodgrass wins the 1960 Pulitzer and is suddenly in demand by schools and even by women. While he goes from marriage to divorce (losing his daughter was the catalyst for his first acclaimed book of poetry) to writer’s block and psychoanalysis, the author is keenly aware of his colleagues’ similar weaknesses. Randall Jarrell is “one poet of that generation I’d thought might escape madness.” At the Univ. of Iowa, he meets many of those troubled geniuses, like Berryman, and goes from writing “the very best second-rate Lowell” to having Robert Lowell emulate his work in popularizing “confessional” poetry. Eloquent autobiography, and for those interested in the inner life of modern American poetry or creativity, essential reading.
Pub Date: April 14, 1999
ISBN: 1-880238-75-6
Page Count: 200
Publisher: BOA Editions
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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