An enthralling collection, with themes both grand and intimate and verses that pack a wallop of feeling.
Royal romance, desolate churchyards, the destruction of a city, and traffic snarled by a snowstorm are among the subjects of these captivating poems.
Much of Huhn’s poetry explores spacious historical scenes through a close-up view of small details that highlight the symbiosis of beauty, brutality, and decay. In these stanzas, the Kassite kings of ancient Babylonia sponsor the crafting of gorgeous rings by importing goldsmiths enslaved in their wars of conquest; a Zuni Indian woman fashions necklaces of turquoise and animal figurines as offerings to the souls of the dead flowing by in the river; and a youthful love affair between the young King Louis XIV of France and Marie Mancini is symbolized by the exquisite pearl earrings he gives her and ends in her death vigil as he “lay abed inside / the perfumed chamber / of their reunion, the / upshot of the countless / flowers gathered to mask / the smell of a leg marbled / black with gangrene.” The author also has a fondness for elegies replete with spectral figures and somber meditations on mortality—he describes a tableau of an abandoned church collapsing in on itself like a lost faith, and a sepulchral vision of a woman dressed in a spider-silk white gown who “stands / on a sea of dead / marked by crooked stone / buoys bobbing in dust”; a memento mori that reminds readers besotted by love that “nothing flies / as fast as life.” And there are less dramatic but still vivid renderings of contemporary scenes: The mundane crisis of a snow day, including a tragic hit-and-run, unfolds in a staticky jangle of AM-radio news reports; a man arrives at the beach “hoping / to get wet // but Untreated / Raw Sewage Spill // No Swimming / said the sign.”
Huhn’s writing is dense, sometimes cryptic (endnotes illuminate some of his more obscure references), and impressionistic; the poems’ structures feel loose-jointed and improvised, but the language is concise and compressed, with a single word suggesting a world. His imagery is dazzlingly evocative, conveying cinematic visuals in the Vesuvian eruption described in “Cast in Herculaneum”: “Mountaintop blossom / blacks out heavens / a sun the gods captured / breaks through crust / pounding free / Luminous / springs burst skyward / Barely time / to scoop up / a handful of / jewels.” Huhn can step down from these mythopoetic heights into a quieter register that, in “Summer Fragment,” infuses the annoying grime of everyday life with a glow of numinous meaning: “Dearest don’t forget / and one last ask— / know anything good / to get gum off shoes? / A wad I picked up / on the boardwalk / won’t scrape off / It sticks like those / heavy summer days / when the thunderstorm / opens down so fast / we forget the sun / was just here.” This is open-hearted, emotionally resonant poetry, never more so than in this simple, exquisite rhyme in “Envoi”: “How lovers soon forget the day / When heaven shone upon the face / That built the little cottage dear / And wrapped with gold the dying year.”
An enthralling collection, with themes both grand and intimate and verses that pack a wallop of feeling.Pub Date: July 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781609644680
Page Count: 86
Publisher: BlazeVOX
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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