With as much myth-making as metrical analysis, poet Hughes's diverse pieceswhether on Shakespeare, Sylvia Plath, war poetry, or Norse mythscohere into a provocative, bewitched view of poetry. In Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (not reviewed), Hughes formulated a central, universal myth of multiply incarnated warring male (rational) and female (creative) deities. Here he employs a similar critical apparatus with the atavistic figure of the Shaman-poet, complete with initiation rites and ecstatic trances, to everything he reads. Dylan Thomas, Wilfred Owen, Yeats, Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, and Serbian poet Vasko Popa receive this unique treatment, and if it tends to level individual poetic talent, it heightens certain aspects in common, such as the formation of the imagination in conflict. The formation of Hughes's own poetic ideas unfolds in essays on the imagination, for and about children, and book reviews that absorb and transmute such subjects as ``primitive'' poetry, the ballad form, superstition, and environmentalism. Hughes's central myth, idiosyncratically exploiting Freud and Jung, views ``Westernized civilized man'' as ``the evolutionary error'' that has tried to suppress the Natural Goddess through rationality; specifically in England, he sees puritanical Protestantism ousting quasi-pagan Catholicism during the Reformation, and Britain finally losing its fables and mother tongue to Enlightenment neoclassicism. His themes unite in an extraordinary essay on Coleridge's conflicted imagination. This tour de force excursion through Coleridge's three famous visionary poems recasts his biography in a Shaman's mold while articulately examining his style and subject. Conversely, Hughes's essays about Sylvia Plath are sometimes strained, but those sparely and protectively written ones about her estate yield to a vivid reconstruction of the drafts of ``Sheep in Fog.'' Allowing for characteristic poetic license, the reader finishes Hughes's best pieces with a renewed understanding of poetryand a rekindled passion for it.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-13625-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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