James Dickey, fresh from winning a National Book Award and an appointment as Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress, has also recently been enshrined in one of Life magazine's pictorial essays where the Dow Jones rating was a smashing "presently the hottest of emerging U.S. poets." Is Dickey being groomed as the All-American successor to Robert Frost? The collection here contains Dickey's three previous volumes and a sampling of later work, including "Falling," his most adventurous experiment in the "open" structure since "The Firebombing" of two years ago. While Dickey's themes remain fairly constant—fugitive intermingling with nature, family, childhood, the wartime experience—he has been steadily, if subtly, breaking off from his early well-constructed mode and reaching out towards the rawer, shapeless "conclusionless poem" with the line-breaks, shots of rapid quasi-cinematic images, and a dramatic action which is both of the everyday and a kind of mystic discovery of, or rebirth into, the phenomenal world. Masculine, compassionate, essentially conservative, Dickey's poems are incarnations of remembered joy and pain, a quietly intense celebration of the senses, an acceptance of the inherently tragic yet wonder-awakening landscape of man—the qualities, in short, of a good national poet circa the sixties.
Pub Date: June 1, 1967
ISBN: 0819560553
Page Count: 315
Publisher: Wesleyan Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1967
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s...
Music journalist and musician Wald (Talking 'Bout Your Mama: The Dozens, Snaps, and the Deep Roots of Rap, 2014, etc.) focuses on one evening in music history to explain the evolution of contemporary music, especially folk, blues, and rock.
The date of that evening is July 25, 1965, at the Newport Folk Festival, where there was an unbelievably unexpected occurrence: singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, already a living legend in his early 20s, overriding the acoustic music that made him famous in favor of electronically based music, causing reactions ranging from adoration to intense resentment among other musicians, DJs, and record buyers. Dylan has told his own stories (those stories vary because that’s Dylan’s character), and plenty of other music journalists have explored the Dylan phenomenon. What sets Wald's book apart is his laser focus on that one date. The detailed recounting of what did and did not occur on stage and in the audience that night contains contradictory evidence sorted skillfully by the author. He offers a wealth of context; in fact, his account of Dylan's stage appearance does not arrive until 250 pages in. The author cites dozens of sources, well-known and otherwise, but the key storylines, other than Dylan, involve acoustic folk music guru Pete Seeger and the rich history of the Newport festival, a history that had created expectations smashed by Dylan. Furthermore, the appearances on the pages by other musicians—e.g., Joan Baez, the Weaver, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Dave Van Ronk, and Gordon Lightfoot—give the book enough of an expansive feel. Wald's personal knowledge seems encyclopedic, and his endnotes show how he ranged far beyond personal knowledge to produce the book.
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s personal feelings about Dylan's music or persona.Pub Date: July 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236668-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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