Of interest to poetry neophytes and newcomers to Williams’ work, less so to seasoned readers.
A personal and critical homage to a giant of American poetry.
William Carlos Williams (1883–1963), one of America’s most respected 20th-century writers, is the author of numerous books of poetry, fiction, essay, drama and autobiography, including Spring and All (1923), Life Along the Passaic River (1938), and The Farmers’ Daughters (1961). He is recognized as one of the central figures in postwar American poetry and is often associated with Modernism and, somewhat erroneously, Imagism. The prolific Berry (Imagination in Place, 2010, etc.) also works in multiple genres, and he is perhaps as well-known for poetry and fiction as for essays on a wide range of topics, including farming and agriculture, ecological awareness, rural American culture, poetics and imagination and politics. With a sensibility that is decidedly pastoral, agrarian, even populist, it is not surprising that Berry reads Williams via a poetics of place, or what he calls “local adaptation.” This is a fairly conventional reading that contrasts Williams—the “true” regional poet of rural America—with the supposedly more urban, cosmopolitan and international avant-garde writers like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Although Berry acknowledges Williams’ complexity and antipoetic tendencies, as well as his similarities to Eliot, he always returns him to a fundamentally lyrical poetics interested in the “mass of detail” and an attempt to find beauty and order in nature via poetry. This interpretation is somewhat pedestrian and situates Williams as a poet on a romantic quest for some kind of unmediated contact with nature and the objects of reality. The importance of Williams’s phrase “no ideas but in things” has been persistently exaggerated by critics, and Berry uses it as a kind of springboard to argue that Williams’ poetry is “culturally useful.” Finally, the author’s attacks on writers and critics teaching in universities—“literary industrialists”—seem misplaced.
Of interest to poetry neophytes and newcomers to Williams’ work, less so to seasoned readers.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-58243-714-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2010
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
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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