Like Nikki Giovanni in her gentler moods, Alice Walker can evoke a whole realm of experience with the soft black inflections of a simple statement. She generally says most by implication, and her best poems have a wonderful unelaborated integrity — ones about her country childhood, for example — as if, having proved good in her memory, they require no more than selection and balance. This is, when you think of it, quite enough — the selection will be either convincing or not, the balance hit or missed, and there is no fudging. A hard way to work, but, as we see in "Expect Nothing" and "Nobody's Darling," poems about disappointment and self-sufficiency, it is a matter of temperament as much as technique, a basic reserve. This explains why her less successful poems ("Eagle Rock" for example) strike us as more false than bad; and, in another way, it illuminates the skeptical ironies of the revolutionary pieces and a kind of willed dissolving in the love poems. Brightly sensate, true to a definite, attractive mind.
Pub Date: Jan. 24, 1972
ISBN: 0156766205
Page Count: 100
Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1972
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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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