Sure-handed verse work in multiple registers.
In a new collection “for travelers,” Milligan sometimes races and sometimes tools along; no matter the speed, it’s a pleasing ride.
In a recent interview, former Globe Theatre director Mark Rylance argued that much of Shakespeare’s brilliance is his control of the demotic, his acknowledgment that the real power of poetry may not lie in the words only he can say but in the words we all can say. Veteran poet Milligan (Lost and Certain of It, 2006, etc.) understands this concept, as well, and his latest book is a rushing river that spins and eddies around a few well-placed stones of utterly common speech. “Strings,” a sort of elegy for lost parents, opens with the exhausted “good grief, Daddy,” and slips away with the simple refrain of a woman whose mind has abandoned her: “now, who are you?” Around such vernacular anchors, Milligan builds a poetic structure characterized by balance (the “arabesque” of the title is a ballet pose demanding poise). The poet divides his book into three parts; the first and third feature relatively short stanzas and clipped lines while the second is full of longer prose poems “written at speed.” Most poets work well in one mode, either economy or abandon. Milligan can do both with grace. “Waiting for the Tow” is a study in brevity that teeters but never quite falls into the gnomic; it opens, provocatively, “The day is severed: / planned from unplanned, / necessary from / necessary now.” By contrast, “Four-Stroke,” a longer piece from the middle section, spreads out: “If ever you spent much quality time on the hurricane deck of a trusted motorcycle then had to give it up—trading it in, say, for a station wagon to haul around your rock band or maybe pay a tuition bill or buy an engagement ring—then you’ll recognize the symptoms of the syndrome.” That no word is wasted in either type of poem demonstrates the poet’s experience.
Sure-handed verse work in multiple registers.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9970353-0-8
Page Count: 100
Publisher: West End Press
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2016
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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