A comprehensive, valuable, and enthusiastic introduction to reading and enjoying poetry.
An instructional workbook focuses on appreciating and analyzing poetry.
Longtime educator and librarian Zenor here presents an oversized paperback aimed at providing “everything necessary for a meaningful and insightful poetry book club.” She lays out her approaches to developing the practice of “close and active reading” of poetry, although the principles she explores will serve fans of any kind of literature. Her methodology encompasses an examination of 12 concepts, ranging from “Symbol” and “Character” to “Theme” and “Audience.” For each concept, she includes a series of poems (and brief biographies of the poets) and then a thorough analysis. Under “Imagery,” for example, Zenor first explains that the idea involves “the use of words to present a sensory experience,” and then discusses poems ranging from Robert Browning’s “Meeting at Night” to Oscar Wilde’s “Symphony in Yellow.” In every example, she includes bonus poems and discussion prompts of a straightforward and useful nature (“What is the point of view of ‘When I heard the learn’d astronomer,’ and how does that impact” Walt Whitman’s poem?). Zenor also instructs readers on the mechanics of various poetic rhythms and meters, explaining all the basic concepts and illustrating them with diacritical marks on individual lines of verse. There’s a calm, inviting assurance to all this material that’s cumulatively marvelous and virtually guaranteed to make poetry less intimidating and more intriguing for students of all ages. The author is adept at encouraging her readers to raise their levels of perception, even when she’s dealing with well-known poems like Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “Richard Cory” (“The incongruity of the pleasant aural sounds leading to the unexpected tragic conclusion adds another layer of irony”). This is precisely the kind of involved, nuts-and-bolts instruction that many poetry lovers and book groups need.
A comprehensive, valuable, and enthusiastic introduction to reading and enjoying poetry.Pub Date: March 15, 2025
ISBN: 9798890754929
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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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