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FORGIVE US OUR HAPPINESS

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

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THE ALCHEMIST

Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.

Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind. 

 The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility. 

 Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.

Pub Date: July 1, 1993

ISBN: 0-06-250217-4

Page Count: 192

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993

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I WHO HAVE NEVER KNOWN MEN

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

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