A pedestrian look at the postwar Boston poetry scene by a lesser poet filled with his own self-importance. With the possible exception of San Francisco, Boston in the late 1950s was home to more of the nation's poetic talent than any other city. The number of major talents either residing there or passing through certainly warrants a cultural history, but this isn't it. Davison, longtime poetry editor of the Atlantic Monthly, attempts an insider's look into the lives of such figures as Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, and Stanley Kunitz, all of whom he continually upstages. He ends a chapter on Anne Sexton, for example, by quoting one of his own poems in its entirety—in a book that generally quotes sparing snippets of verse. Of most value is the first chapter, which details the rise and demise of the Poets' Theatre of Cambridge, which commissioned new works by poets and gave them a stage. The rest of the text coasts superficially through everyone's life and work; the literary gossip is stale, poetic analysis almost absent. Everything but Davison's own career, which occupies a long second chapter, is treated in shorthand; even the glaring sexism of the Boston poetry scene is simply mentioned and dismissed. The coverage of women poets is particularly ungenerous and snippy; the chapter on Adrienne Rich ends with the unsupported observation, ``Though no poet of this period expended more agony on the will to change, others may well have more completely succeeded.'' Perhaps the central unanswered question of the period is the one posed by Richard Wilbur: ``A lot of people were falling apart and preparing to die, and I wonder to what extent that is really unrelated to choice of literary style.'' Don't look for answers here. (16 b&w illustrations)
Pub Date: Aug. 15, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-40658-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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