A monotone collection of high-minded poems.
Parihar praises the natural world and contemplates the self in this poetry collection.
There’s an art to assembling a poetry collection. Parihar addresses this topic in a poem entitled, appropriately, “A Poetry Collection,” musing how poems on different topics work together to form a whole: “Each poem a window to a different world, / Where emotions unfurl and truths are unfurled. / From the depths of despair to the heights of love, / The collection resonates, like a dove.” Parihar does indeed offer many windows on disparate subjects, from the grandeur of nature to the ghostlike anxieties that creep up on him at night and even the particular struggles of the American middle class. The poet’s chosen form overwhelms the content of the poems, however. All 71 entries are composed of four-line stanzas with mostly AABB rhyme schemes. The effect is demonstrated by this trio of sequential offerings that celebrate three American cities: “The Manhattan” begins, “In the heart of a city that never sleeps, / Where dreams take flight and secrets keep, / Stands Manhattan, a beacon of light, / A skyline of wonder, a mesmerizing sight.” Next, “Los Angeles” starts with “In the land where sunshine reigns supreme, / Amidst the palm trees and silver screen, / There lies a city of dreams untold, / Where stories unfold, and legends behold.” And finally, “Chicago”: “In the city by the lake, where the wind whispers tales, / Chicago stands proud, where ambition prevails. / A skyline of steel, rising tall and bold, / In the heart of the Midwest, a story unfolds.” The repetition of this structure flattens all that it touches, blending poems together so that all differentiation dissolves. It would be one thing if the lines rang out, but the rhymes often feel forced. To revisit the stanza about poetry collections: Emotions unfurl, but truths are unfurled? Why? Does a dove resonate? Parihar has clearly enjoyed composing these poems, but he’ll need to try a bit harder—and maybe even vary his form—if he expects others to enjoy them as much as he does.
A monotone collection of high-minded poems.Pub Date: March 25, 2024
ISBN: 9798320766812
Page Count: 141
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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