An engaging collection with luminous language that seeks to explore and reassure.
Schumacher’s sixth set of poems offers meditations on the impermanence of life, the majesty of nature, and the importance of faith.
Starting off in spring, around St. Patrick’s Day, these vivid poems describe wonders in the outdoors in “Scenic Interludes” with flashes of brilliant color, such as “pink cactus flowers” and tumbleweeds that are like “wiry knots / of hair torn from the heads / of battling giants.” With aging, the speaker notes, time slows down so that it’s possible to see “dogwood petals ride the wind / like small white butterflies.” Reflections of time gone by arise in “Recurrence,” in which the speaker visits a now-empty childhood home: “The attic window where I viewed, / as if from a castle tower, the pulsing flow / of people’s lives.” The speaker then realizes that “places cannot hoard our memories.” Other works about nature, the elderly, and immortality give way to a small but amusing group of limericks, and then a final section, whose subject matter spans from Advent to Easter. Faith as a refuge is a predominant theme, as expressed in “Safe Harbor,” which describes “angelic voices high above / in the dazzling light of a single star.” The radiant poem “Christmas” celebrates “the friendly glow of lanterns and candles…as visible revelations of / a universal connection to Life.” Schumacher’s poems do a fine job of capturing the beauty found in nature and the emotions one feels when experiencing it. The jump from insightful reflections on aging to the search for a way to talk about immortality is seamless. The collection also offers works with offbeat scenarios, including a compelling exploration of the biblical figure Melchior. A few poems feel light as a feather, but more abundant are those that effortlessly express complicated thoughts.
An engaging collection with luminous language that seeks to explore and reassure.Pub Date: May 11, 2017
ISBN: 9781614935162
Page Count: 82
Publisher: The Peppertree Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
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
PERSPECTIVES
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.
An examination of how the U.S. can revitalize its commitment to freedom.
In this ambitious study, Snyder, author of On Tyranny, The Road to Unfreedom, and other books, explores how American freedom might be reconceived not simply in negative terms—as freedom from coercion, especially by the state—but positive ones: the freedom to develop our human potential within sustaining communal structures. The author blends extensive personal reflections on his own evolving understanding of liberty with definitions of the concept by a range of philosophers, historians, politicians, and social activists. Americans, he explains, often wrongly assume that freedom simply means the removal of some barrier: “An individual is free, we think, when the government is out of the way. Negative freedom is our common sense.” In his careful and impassioned description of the profound implications of this conceptual limitation, Snyder provides a compelling account of the circumstances necessary for the realization of positive freedom, along with a set of detailed recommendations for specific sociopolitical reforms and policy initiatives. “We have to see freedom as positive, as beginning from virtues, as shared among people, and as built into institutions,” he writes. The author argues that it’s absurd to think of government as the enemy of freedom; instead, we ought to reimagine how a strong government might focus on creating the appropriate conditions for human flourishing and genuine liberty. Another essential and overlooked element of freedom is the fostering of a culture of solidarity, in which an awareness of and concern for the disadvantaged becomes a guiding virtue. Particularly striking and persuasive are the sections devoted to eviscerating the false promises of libertarianism, exposing the brutal injustices of the nation’s penitentiaries, and documenting the wide-ranging pathologies that flow from a tax system favoring the ultrawealthy.
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9780593728727
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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