What a poet writes when he isn’t writing poetry. Will appeal most to fellow poets and students of the form.
A poet’s notebook reflections on poetry, prose, art, time, and death.
Di Piero (The Man on the Water, 2017, etc.) has established a reputation not only as a prolific poet, but as a critic of the visual arts and an essayist on a wide range of topics. “In college, it seemed all the poets I read wrote prose of a serious kind,” he writes, though he seems to consider himself part of a vanishing tribe: poets who write prose about the world in general rather than confining themselves to the literary microcosm. The author writes in a postscript that when he began publishing his books of essays, his “notebooks had become my workshop, interrogation room, monk’s cell,” and he considered its entries “as out-of-joint essays.” This slim volume works backward chronologically, with the opening and longest section, “From the 2000s,” followed by selections from the 1990s and 1980s. These range from single sentences to paragraphs of varying length and include childhood reveries, critical manifestos, vignettes from cities where he has lived or visited, and musings on the eternal, the transcendent, and the temporal. The pieces don’t really progress or lead anywhere (and, if they did, it would be backward into the past, given the organization), but they occasionally circle back, sometimes revisiting the same topic in almost the same words. There is some lamenting about what poetry has become, carping about critics and academics, and plenty of passion about what Di Piero sees as his mission: “To write a poem that isn’t just a sustained concentrate of feeling but about that condition, that effort to live intensely, write intensely, and maybe not even know the difference.” He places himself in the world as a teacher, a performer at readings, and a critic interacting with other works of art, often visual.
What a poet writes when he isn’t writing poetry. Will appeal most to fellow poets and students of the form.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-88748-624-1
Page Count: 88
Publisher: Carnegie Mellon Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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