There’s much to enjoy in these exuberant “notes.”
A joyful, wistful celebration of poetry, poets, and a poet’s life.
Personal matters that former poet laureate Hall wrote about in Essays After Eighty (2014, etc.) pop up again, this time with a greater sense of urgency: “As I write toward my nineties I shed my skin. I tell short anecdotes, I hazard an opinion, speculate, assume, and remember. Why should the nonagenarian hold anything back?” In the book’s fourth section, “A Carnival of Losses,” the author returns to stories about his New Hampshire life, relatives, friends, his appearances on Garrison Keillor’s radio show (where once—off air—they traded dirty limericks), watching baseball, and interviewing Boris Karloff in high school. Also included here is his somber and poignant New Yorker piece, “Necropoetics,” largely about his wife, poet and translator Jane Kenyon, who died in 1995. “Poetry begins with elegy,” he writes, as he ruminates on the subject. Poetasters will enjoy his “The Selected Poets of Donald Hall” section, pithy, sharp, and gossipy profiles and anecdotes about poets he has known and met, some slight—e.g., “my recollections of some poets are brief. Allen Tate always looked grumpy.” These are countered by those Hall loved, like Robert Creeley, Theodore Roethke, Seamus Heaney, and James Wright. Then there’s James Dickey, the “best liar I ever knew,” and Tom Clark, the “best student I ever had.” Hall’s admiring piece on Richard Wilbur includes a short, insightful passage on prosody in Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress.” The book’s first section, “Notes Nearing Ninety,” shows off Hall’s humor and wit, as in “The Vaper,” about how vaping helped him quit smoking (mostly), “The Last Poem,” about the only time he expressed his politics in a newspaper ("it went bacterial”), and a piece about frequently losing his teeth—literally.
There’s much to enjoy in these exuberant “notes.”Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-328-82634-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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