Review by New York Times Review
PRAIRIE FIRES: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, by Caroline Fraser. (Metropolitan/Holt, $35.) This thoroughly researched biography of the "Little House" author perceptively captures Wilder's extraordinary life and legacy, offering fresh interpretations of Western American history along the way. EMPRESS OF THE EAST: How a European Slave Girl Became Queen of the Ottoman Empire, by Leslie Peirce. (Basic, $32.) Peirce tells the remarkable story of Roxelana, a 16th-century Christian woman in Suleiman the Magnificent's harem who achieved unprecedented power and changed the nature of the Ottoman government. MRS. OSMOND, by John Banville. (Knopf, $27.95.) Banville's sequel to Henry James's novel "Portrait of a Lady," faithful to the master's style and story, follows Isabel Archer back to Rome and the possible end of her marriage. THE REPORTER'S KITCHEN: Essays, by Jane Kramer. (St. Martin's, $26.99.) In a delectable collection of culinary profiles, book reviews and reminiscences, the longtime New Yorker correspondent shows how she approaches life through food and food through life. FUTURE HOME OF THE LIVING GOD, by Louise Erdrich. (HarperCollins, $28.99.) What if human beings are neither inevitable nor ultimate? That's the premise of Erdrich's fascinating new novel, which describes a world where evolution is running backward and the future of civilization is in doubt. THE DAWN WATCH: Joseph Conrad in a Global World, by Maya Jasanoff. (Penguin Press, $30.) Conrad explored the frontiers of a globalized world at the turn of the last century. Jasanoff uses Conrad's novels and his biography in order to tell the history of that moment, one that mirrors our own. THE DAWN OF DETROIT: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits, by Tiya Miles. (The New Press, $27.95.) This rich and surprising book begins in the early 18th century, when the French controlled Detroit and most slaves were both Native American and female. THIS IS THE PLACE: Women Writing About Home, edited by Margot Kahn and Kelly McMasters. (Seal Press, paper, $16.99.) For these writers, home is where we are most ourselves - our mother tongue, our homeland, our people or just one person. JAMES WRIGHT: A Life in Poetry, by Jonathan Blunk. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $40.) Blunk illuminates the influences and obsessions of the ecstatic, troubled Wright and reveals him to be a lot like his poems: brilliant, intense and equally likely to soar or faceplant. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 30, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Like James Joyce, the great mid-twentieth-century poet James Wright got out of his home town as soon as he could and wrote of it ever thereafter. Neither oppressive Martins Ferry, Ohio, a steel-industry town in which he went to the factory early, nor a familial streak of mental illness his mother was incorrigibly abusive, and he had a breakdown as early as 15 prevented his leaping into literature, beginning with Catullus in high school and rapidly expanding to include much of the world's best poetry along with Dickens, Cervantes, Sterne, and Orwell. A nearly eidetic memory and a Frostian insistence that poetry be spoken made him a celebrated public reader-reciter and an adored teacher. Marriage to a woman too similar in family problems to him (he married well the second time) and resort to drink impeded his early teaching career, but he always made friends among peers (Robert Bly, Donald Hall, Galway Kinnell, Carolyn Kizer, Hayden Carruth, and Leslie Marmon Silko) and students. He kept a voluminous journal, too, that Blunk mines extensively in this seamless fine-fabric of a biography that, while limning its subject with great compassion, arouses a powerful appetite for Wright's writing as well as that of his beloved forebears and colleagues.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Blunk (A Wild Perfection, coeditor) chronicles the life and works of poet James Wright (1927-1980) in this admirable, if sometimes overbearing, authorized biography. Given access to Wright's unpublished work and drawing on more than 200 interviews (most notably with Wright's friend Robert Bly), Blunk offers a wealth of details about the poet's personal and professional life, to an extent that can be off-putting. For instance, do we need to know that Wright mailed one correspondent "four-by-six-inch lined notebook sheets filled with single-spaced type, punched with six holes in the margin and hand-numbered at the top"? His domestic life is extensively delineated-a turbulent first marriage, an enduring second one-as is his long battle with alcoholism and depression. Blunk gives discerning attention to Wright's work, following individual poems from draft form to critical reception, as he traces Wright's larger artistic trajectory from his first book, 1956's The Green Wall, to his posthumously published last, 1982's This Journey. Blunk draws a particular contrast between The Green Wall, where the poems are highly and conventionally structured, and 1963's The Branch Will Not Break, where Wright's freer, experimental voice is first heard. Unarguably the definitive work on Wright, this biography contains perhaps more than a simple admirer of his work needs to know. 16 pages of b&w illus. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
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Review by Library Journal Review
James Wright (1927-80) is often on the short list of great 20th-century poets, and his life reads like something out of a Greek myth or Puccini opera: poverty, self-destruction, drunkenness, doubt, loving friends, illicit romance, broken marriage, wondrous success, and possible madness all circling around a seemingly endless and singular devotion to the art of poetry. Poet and critic Blunk has done a commendable job in telling Wright's story. He presents a great deal of unpublished material (letters, journals, etc.) that shed much light not only on Wright's life but on American poetry of that era; Wright seems to have been a beloved friend and correspondent of many important literary figures of his time (Anne Sexton, James Dickey, Maxine Kumin, etc.). Blunk's book reads like a work of great love, opening wide the door to Wright scholars; however, the narrative gets occasionally bogged down in the abundant scholarship. And yet what stands abundantly clear is the compassion and devotion of a man to his art: both in the picture of Wright and in Blunk's telling. VERDICT Recommended for university libraries and large poetry collections. [See Prepub Alert, 4/24/17.]-Herman -Sutter, St. Agnes Acad., Houston © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An authorized biography of the Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet.Even though they never met, in Blunk, poet and co-editor of Wright's Selected Letters, James Wright (1927-1980) has found his Boswell. Blunk's account of the poet's life is often a day-by-day record of just about everything significant he did. Anne, Wright's second wife, provided his biographer with reams of primary source materialWright was a relentless letter writerand Blunk conducted hundreds of interviews and compiled a detailed schedule of Wright's readings. Thanks to a prodigious memory, he could entertain his audiences by reciting hundreds of poems as well as his own. He was born in the run-down, industrial town of Martins Ferry on the Ohio River and was always desperate to leave it, which he did with a stint in the Army. His first wife, Liberty, even married him "to get out." But Wright never really left, and it inspired his poems, with themes of a "baffled loneliness," poverty, and down-and-out people. Blunk meticulously explores Wright's years of teaching, his painful bouts of depression, his recurring alcoholism, and how his poems were crafted. Wright was a maker of poems, revising them over and over, constantly constructing, tearing down, and rebuilding. Quoting generously from Wright's poems throughout, Blunk carefully chronicles the ongoing development of his style as he moved from regular meter and rhyme to free verse, simple language, and striking imagery. His many translations of contemporary Spanish poetry helped contribute to this evolutionas did Wright's close friend, poet and editor Robert Bly, who did "more than any other poet to secure Wright's legacy." Virtually every important poet of the age had links to Wright, including James Dickey, Donald Hall, W.S. Merwin, Theodore Roethke, and Galway Kinnell. He became especially close to Anne Sexton. A much-needed, engaging, and discerning biography that should help Wright find a new generation of readers. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
