Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This collection of 19 essays from Mason, former poet laureate of Colorado, is an excellent contribution to the genres of both literary criticism and travel writing. Mason expertly weaves the stories of great writers and places both ancient and new together into an imaginative literary odyssey. The book is divided into three sections on the respective themes of postcolonial places, writers in exile, and eccentric Americans. Mason's writing rises to the level that he describes great travel writers as achieving, that "we don't read these writers for tips on hotels and restaurants, but for literary experience, for enlargement of soul, and for pleasure." He explores the Mediterranean and American West, the writerly connections between these places, and how voices, like places, "move through us as we move through them." In the title essay, he ties together Venice and Idaho, showing that the Italian city and U.S. state have both Ezra Pound and Ernest Hemingway in common. Throughout, Mason reminds the reader that travel writing should not be reduced to a lesser genre, and, from Herodotus to W.H. Auden, has been an important literary tradition that enables us to explore the world through reading. This special collection leaves readers with a sense of wanderlust and a refreshing new lens through which to view literature and travel. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
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Review by Library Journal Review
In this profoundly curious collection, poet Mason (Davey McGravy; Ludlow) has gathered a selection of criticism that attempts to link the importance of place with the development of the poet's voice. Though efforts toward that end are of some interest, what makes this grand work of criticism is -Mason's own voice. The former poet laureate of Colorado displays a serious delight in contemplating the importance of geographic place on a poet or author's work. But the book's real value is its curiosity and urgent desire to explore the artist and the art. Mason reveals a glorious passion for literature, as well as an almost Whitmanesque openness to the ideas and emotions that inspire creative acts at all levels. Included in this delightful collection are essays about some of modern literature's more famous exiles: Joseph Conrad, Ezra Pound, and W.H. Auden among them, as well as such travelers as Herodotus, Omar Khayyam, Bruce Chatwin, and writers linked inextricably to place: Ernest Hemingway, Robinson Jeffers, and Wallace Stegner. The most interesting piece is Mason's resurrection of the all but lost poet Belle Turnbull and her verse-novel Goldboat, which he calls an example of "populist modernism," that is "like so many significant poems, an eccentricity." VERDICT Highly recommended for poetry and literary studies collections.-Herman Sutter, St. Agnes Acad., Houston © Copyright 2018. 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
A combination of penetrating considerations of renowned and out-of-fashion poets and keen appreciations of the interplay of landscape and culture.Poet and novelist Mason (English/Colorado Coll.; Sea Salt, 2014, etc.), who served as the poet laureate of Colorado from 2010 to 2014, avoids an excess of academic jargon in favor of a straightforward style, though occasionally his descriptions lean toward the overwrought and there is a tendency, largely understandable, to worship at the altar of poetry a little too devoutly. The strengths of this collection are the author's closely reasoned essays and expansive book reviews. Apart from a reminiscence of his years in Greece, which generates thoughtful appreciations of the writers Patrick Leigh Fermor ("a life of inspired insouciance") and Bruce Chatwin, Mason explores the work of a wide range of literary artists. The best of these approach such notables as W.H. Auden, Ezra Pound, Joseph Conrad, and Robinson Jeffers with fresh eyes and bracing prose. At times, Mason mounts a rigorous defense of the artist in question; at others, he offers cleareyed, warts-and-all analyses. Early on he also recalls the interesting story of how TheRubaiyat of Omar Khayyam was rescued by a philologist in a remainder bin in 1861 and the process by which it was published and disseminated and became a sensation. Clearly, reading (and writing) is a form of travel and transcendence for the author, who conveys this feeling in erudite, often intoxicating languagethough he does get rather inebriated himself from time to time. Mason wears his liberalism prominently, which is fine when not walking the precipice of preachiness, as he sometimes does, but it is hard to dispute his melancholy assessment that "history can seem a bombardment of human stupidities."Attached to the notion that all places are stories and all stories places, Mason, at his best, draws an illuminating literary cartography with many fascinating ports of call. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
