paper 0-87451-919-5 Ellen Bryant Voigt picked this debut volume for a prize sponsored by the legendary Bread Loaf Writers— Conference, and in many ways it’s a compendium of the styles and themes common among first-time poets these days, from the goofy exhilaration in its title to the aesthetic implied in lines from —The Taste of Wild Cherry—: —I—m writing / the scene as it happens, seeking / from light and shadow the permanence of stone.— Simic’s surreal self-indulgence, Wright’s wimpy transcendence, Strand’s coy abstractions: Forhan has sampled from these and other moderns in verse that also pays obligatory homage to Whitman and Ginsberg with self-described —howls— and —yawps.— The poet’s sometimes startling diction and imagery disguise the emptiness and nothingness he celebrates in poem after poem—as in the somewhat contrarian —An Honest Forest,— which describes a place where —nothing happens— and there’s little —to witness.— Forhan sometimes resorts to childlike rhythms in poems that read like fractured fairy tales (—Cracking Open,— —Ginger Cake—), and he’s often giddy with life’s little astonishments, as in the banal title poem, with its lame insight, —There’s always something.— A surprisingly sharp elegy for his father, in which the poet sees himself in the old man, stands out from all the bliss-seeking whimsy and the many lazy poems that pad the volume. Like so many contemporary poets, Forhan distrusts language itself and —the fetid stench— of words, so you have to wonder why he bothers at all, or whether he’s really taken full measure of all his poetic assertions.
Pub Date: Aug. 31, 1999
ISBN: 0-87451-938-1
Page Count: 64
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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