A fine introduction to the prose of a modern master.
Elegant musings, jottings, appreciations, memoirs, and reviews by the late renowned poet.
Merrill (1926–95) gained recognition for many things: as a poet with a flair for intellectually charged wordplay, à la Wallace Stevens; as a critic with an appreciation for the hard work of creation as much as for “the whole level of entertainment in art”; as a gay aesthete whose frankness was a source of embarrassment for some members of his well-heeled family (of Merrill Lynch fame). The present volume—edited by poets McClatchy and Yenser, who teamed up for Merrill’s Collected Poems (2001)—highlights all those facets. In the last matter, it reprints Merrill’s memoir A Different Person (1993), which charts his growth from somewhat frivolous youth to somewhat more tempered analysand, all against a Roman backdrop. As for the first two, the volume gathers a few dozen interviews, articles, essays, and forewords that speak to Merrill’s interests and methods. One, for instance, is the use of an unlikely tool for composition: “Drugs have worked for some, meditation for others; in my own case it was something as apparently flimsy as the Ouija board.” (Elsewhere, Merrill recalls having contacted the soul of an engineer “dead of cholera in Cairo” who had recently bumped into Goethe.) Merrill defends his somewhat formal approach to poetry as seemly deference to tradition. He remarks, “With fewer and fewer people, even bright ones, who know what traditions are, my old-fashioned kind of poem may soon be mistaken for something much newer than it is, and read with appropriate cries of delight.” At another point, he professes a suspicion for poetic grandiosity, noting, “I’m on the side of careful consideration.” Even so, he gets off some nicely wild lines, particularly in his travel journals, as when he writes of a South American trip, “The river steamer blisters and moans. The banks suck their gums endlessly as it shudders upstream.”
A fine introduction to the prose of a modern master.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-41136-4
Page Count: 880
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
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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