Old-school poetry with grand themes and darkly romantic execution.
Mythology, mayhem, and the macabre roil this set of haunting poems.
Lind includes some 55 pieces written over 35 years, many of them infused with self-consciously archaic language and themes. His earlier poems have a highly rhetorical sensibility, as in the phallic anthem “Priapus”: “With what shall ye compare my hideous strength, / Mere Man? / With the night-black bull that rears and spits / In its cloven lust?” His middle-period poems often deploy a singsong style whose seeming simplicity and artlessness disturbingly highlight sinister, sometimes-violent content, as in “The Pretty Magpie”: “Once I loved a little dog, / A golden spaniel bitch, / They came and shot it all to death / And left it in a ditch.” His late period casts poems in an idiom that’s more modern and impressionistic in its continued treatment of fraught, primal material, as in “The First and the Last.” He also offers a long adaptation of the Icelandic saga of Gunnar and Hallgerður, about a woman who brings her husband nothing but trouble; it’s a riveting, gore-spattered epic suffused with eerie Nordic hallucination: “And woven into her straggled hair, / The bones of children / That rattled and clinked in the wind.” Lind’s poems feature strong narratives, bold voices, and evocative imagery that’s besotted by both Eros and Thanatos, as in the title poem, a gothic imagining of a crowlike lover that’s an inspired mashup of the work of Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire: “I am but carrion for your clever mouth / And quick, sharp fingers that rake and rack.” Overall, this collection is a great read for those who like hotblooded verse.
Old-school poetry with grand themes and darkly romantic execution.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-80227-216-1
Page Count: 354
Publisher: Timothy John Jacobs
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A surprisingly sensual sports romance.
A collegiate diver and swimmer secretly pursue kink together, and risk falling in love along the way.
Scarlett Vandermeer is struggling. Despite a successful recovery from the injury that almost ended her Stanford diving career, she hasn’t been able to get her head together, and it’s affecting her performance. Plus, she’s trying to stay focused on getting into medical school. A relationship would be out of the question. By comparison, Lukas Blomqvist is a swimming idol, a record-breaker who wins medals as easily as breathing, and Scarlett has long been convinced he would never look in her direction—until one fateful night when a mutual friend lets slip that they have something unexpected in common: Scarlett likes to be submissive in the bedroom, while Lukas prefers to take a dominant approach. Now, they both know a big secret about each other, and it’s something neither of them can stop thinking about. It’s Lukas who suggests they have a fling—purely physical, just to take the edge off, so Scarlett can get out of her own head and stop overthinking her dives. Initially, their arrangement is easy to stick to, but the more time they spend together, the more Scarlett starts to realize that what she feels for Lukas is more than physical attraction. Complicating the situation is the fact that Scarlett’s friend Penelope Ross used to go out with Lukas, and the longer Scarlett keeps mum about her true feelings for him, the more difficult it is to keep the situation hidden from another person she really cares about. While Scarlett and Lukas’ relationship does begin as a physical one, their deeper psychological connection takes a little too long to emerge amid all the other storylines, resulting in a somewhat rushed resolution. However, Hazelwood’s latest is proof of the depth and maturity that has emerged in her writing over the years, and it highlights her embrace of sexier, more emotional elements than were present in her original STEMinist rom-coms.
A surprisingly sensual sports romance.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593641057
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
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