by Allen Lee Ireland ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 12, 2024
A collection that delivers a pleasant and appreciative, if slightly uneven, poetic take on nature themes.
Ireland presents a poetry book that celebrates the outdoors and offers ruminative reflections on life.
The poet opens with “In the Woods,” about a forest walk with “summer overhead” and “autumn underfoot,” in which the speaker considers how they are “Just kicking death around / While I am lost in life.” He waxes poetic about Appalachia in “Dead in the Water”: “With its hills like swells, / And its breezes like the sound / Heard on shores and shells.” Ireland observantly documents in “Two Trees” how a “fragile white-haired lady” stares at her discarded Christmas tree from indoors, “Her window like a mirror in between.” The speaker in “Dark Place” tries to cure their “dark propensity to go / From high to low” by venturing outside, while in “Private Road,”the speaker laments how housing development changes the landscape, noting, “we used to have the mountain to ourselves”; two pages later, in “Mountain Development,” the speaker mourns that “Soon signs will forbid / And a gate will block / The pleasure of / Our evening walk.” A few works take darker turns, such as “Creek Rock” and “Roadside Example,” which comment on horrific antigay violence. However, Ireland’s affinity for the outdoors is most evident in this collection; his descriptions are visceral and evocative, as when noting “dead leaves, // Deep as a shag rug” (“In the Woods”) or the “firefly-dotted dark” (“Private Road”). His rhyme schemes and use of perspective are playful in lines such as “Five deer were gathered for a private meeting / This evening at the bottom of the lawn. / I opened the back door and yelled a greeting: / The buck let out a snort, and all were gone” (“Private Meeting”). However, a handful of political poems feel ill-fitting, such as “Sunday-Morning Quarterback,” which recalls CBS News Sunday Morning’s stories on the Vietnam War in the 1980s, evoking “the President—the fat-faced Godfather— / Embattled but safe at home, defending the whole endeavor.”
A collection that delivers a pleasant and appreciative, if slightly uneven, poetic take on nature themes.Pub Date: July 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781625494658
Page Count: 86
Publisher: David Robert Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Share your opinion of this book
by Amy Tan ; illustrated by Amy Tan ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 23, 2024
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
Share your opinion of this book
More by Amy Tan
BOOK REVIEW
by Amy Tan
BOOK REVIEW
by Amy Tan
BOOK REVIEW
by Amy Tan
More About This Book
SEEN & HEARD
Awards & Accolades
Likes
23
Our Verdict
GET IT
IndieBound Bestseller
by Steve Martin illustrated by Harry Bliss ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 17, 2020
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
Awards & Accolades
Likes
23
Our Verdict
GET IT
IndieBound Bestseller
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
Share your opinion of this book
More by Steve Martin
BOOK REVIEW
by Steve Martin ; illustrated by Harry Bliss
BOOK REVIEW
by Steve Martin
BOOK REVIEW
by Steve Martin & illustrated by C.F. Payne
More About This Book
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.