Graves has grown old, but for him it seems to be a process of intensification and, possibly too, the achievement of an unassailable position. The 83 poems in this collection (sections XXVI through XVIII of his ongoing Collected Works) are predominantly love poems, so exultantly autobiographical and so transcendentally pitched that they may cause discomfiture in some readers. Graves identifies his preoccupation in the broadest terms as "the hidden powers of poetic thought" which realize a "fifth-dimensional co-identification of lovers," a literal phenomenon that he takes care to distinguish from mere "idealistic fancy." To an outsider (as the reader will unavoidably be) the difference cannot be so clear, if only because it belongs to an incommunicable order of experience; or it may be that Graves places his passion and his metaphysics in a particularly close and exclusive relationship. The subject is a love affair — apparently platonic but in Plato's original incandescent sense — with a very young gift which will seem, if anything, ideal, though certainly no less valid It entails many moods, themes, occasions, a kind of cantata celebrating the love and the lovers. There are some poems more general and less problematical grouped loosely at the end, but nothing comparable in force or ecstatic music.
Pub Date: Jan. 5, 1972
ISBN: 0385062699
Page Count: 104
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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
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
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