Like his poetry, Levine’s essays are generous, honest, and real.
One of our finest poets recalls a life well lived in poetry.
A former American Poet Laureate and winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, Levine (News of the World, 2009, etc.) was in the process of finishing this sparkling collection of essays and lectures when he died (1928-2015). His good friend and fellow poet Edward Hirsch helped to complete the project. In the title piece, which Hirsch calls “one of the great textured descriptions of a writer finding his vocation,” Levine describes in loving detail discovering a group of fellow aspiring poets at Detroit’s Wayne University, where he read and wrote poetry with a small group of enthusiastic, like-minded undergraduates. “Where would I have been without all of them”—the poets he discovered and the friends “who shared with me their faith in the power of the perfect words.” In a piece on the influence his “master,” Williams Carlos Williams, had on his early career, Levine acknowledges that Williams’ poems, written in the “spoken language of my country,” turned him away from his “English masters toward the effort to create a poetry original and audacious enough to be American.” Great poets don’t always make great teachers. Levine attended the University of Iowa in the fall of 1953 and took Robert Lowell’s class. Lowell taught “badly,” and students started dropping out. John Berryman, on the other hand, captivated the students: “Never again would I encounter so great a poem [by Dylan Thomas] so perfectly presented.” The book is full of scintillating remembrances of fellow poets. Berryman could be “both brilliant and candid,” but Thom Gunn had “an ‘aura,’ a sort of inner beauty that was manifest in all of his actions.” Levine also speaks lovingly of his “mentor and friend” George Hitchcock and his seminal literary magazine, kayak,” and his piece on little-known Roberta Spear, who died young, will have readers rushing to her work.
Like his poetry, Levine’s essays are generous, honest, and real.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49327-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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