An emotional, sometimes-wrenching account of how lines of poetry can be lifelines.
A celebrated poet, novelist, memoirist, and editor returns with an account of a life lived to the music of poetry.
Norton executive editor Bialosky (The Players, 2015, etc.) traces her life by discussing poems that are significant to her or that comment in some fashion on life’s various mileposts. Beginning with early childhood and Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” she continues to the present, pausing to focus on specific works and, in some cases, on the lives of poets. Her sections are short and focused—“Discovery,” “Shame,” “Depression,” “Sexuality,” “Ancestors”—and many of the works and poets will be familiar to most readers: Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Shakespeare, Keats, Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens. But Bialosky introduces some artists who are less familiar in the popular culture: Stanley Plumly, Eavan Boland, Adam Zagajewski. The author uses this format to deal with moments of joy, crisis, surprise, and horror in her life, including the dawning awareness of her love for poetry, the death of her father, the ensuing frustrations of her mother, the struggle to find love, her loss of two newborns, and the suicide of her little sister—a loss Bialosky wrote about in History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life (2011). At times, when the poet’s life is especially relevant, she will tell us a bit about that person (Sylvia Plath); at other times, she offers very little biography (Edwin Arlington Robinson). Although her conception and presentation are fresh and original, Bialosky sometimes slips on a cliché lying in her path—e.g., her blood ran cold when she first read Anne Frank; seeing an attractive young man caused her to feel “like a Christmas tree all lit up.” Thankfully, such bumps in the road are infrequent.
An emotional, sometimes-wrenching account of how lines of poetry can be lifelines.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4516-9320-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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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