3 posts tagged “book reviews”
What can I say about this book? It should be read by every American, especially liberal Christians. It is fine to be invigorated and refined by mythology. To organize your life around a system that creates suffering is, on the other hand, unethical and insincere. If you haven't picked up your copy, please do.
Horror vacui, also known as cenophobia, is a fear of empty spaces. Thomas Heise's poetic treatment of Horror Vacui covers grief with an imagination that fills in every empty space without leaving the reader cramped by poetic density. For a young poet, Heise might be studied nicely next to Dickinson just to consider his nearly baffling approach to death. For him, all loss is personal. The seeing subject is the object in a state of decomposition and obliteration.
In the acknowledgments, Heise says, "My father: these poems are you"; consequently, the collection invites a hunch that readers are being dipped into a family funeral. A good portion of the book confirms suspicions and, with a chilling touch of familiar terror, takes us along on a tour of grief in general.
Heise accomplishes something that most poets should start envying today. He writes poems that stand alone and together with equal unity; like a symphony. While listening to the ghost music in Horror Vacui, a common whisper echoes words, phrases, rhymes, themes, and titles between poems. Themes build upon one another until we are actually, finally, buried with Heise and all of the other dead found in the ground.
At one point, Heise even takes on the 9/11 grief. I work in a public building and I have been noticing that our nation's flag is at half mast more often than not. Heise sees this coming. He doesn't flinch. Death stops most kindly for Mr. Heise.
In the acknowledgments, Heise says, "My father: these poems are you"; consequently, the collection invites a hunch that readers are being dipped into a family funeral. A good portion of the book confirms suspicions and, with a chilling touch of familiar terror, takes us along on a tour of grief in general.
Heise accomplishes something that most poets should start envying today. He writes poems that stand alone and together with equal unity; like a symphony. While listening to the ghost music in Horror Vacui, a common whisper echoes words, phrases, rhymes, themes, and titles between poems. Themes build upon one another until we are actually, finally, buried with Heise and all of the other dead found in the ground.
At one point, Heise even takes on the 9/11 grief. I work in a public building and I have been noticing that our nation's flag is at half mast more often than not. Heise sees this coming. He doesn't flinch. Death stops most kindly for Mr. Heise.
I grew up on the Star Wars films and, somewhere in the middle of adolescence, graduated to George Orwell and Ray Bradbury. As a teacher, I have enjoyed teaching Fahrenheit 451. Dystopic literature can indict a social structure and an individual as they tango away from individual liberation and toward the concrete corridor of collective narratives gone cold. Usula K. Le Guin sites Yevgeny Zamyatin's We as, "the best single work of science fiction yet written." George Orwell and Aldous Huxley both celebrate We as their primary inspiration. While We works as a critique of oppressors attempts to invoke absolute devotion and narrow logic in the control of large groups, it fails as a story. Zamyatin's failure is, ironically, the result of characters who do not crackle with the kind of round, juicy individuality that he seems to long for.
We reads as a series of diary entries, kind of like a blog on vodka and a slow. Recognizing that it was written in 1922, it still brims with a romanticism that seems tired. Remember, this was a year before Edna St. Vincent Millay and T.S. Elliot shocked the world with fresh poetry. Hemingway would publish In Our Time in 1925. My point is, the writing world was alive and there was little room for the pretentious flitting between experimentation and stale artifice that slog from Zamyatin's yawning Edison. Pages gasp with an asthmatic desperation. At the strongest moments, I comic book characters peek around imagination's restless corners, never human beings. In fact, an ambitious graphic novelist might be able to revive Zamyatin's work.
Zamyatin's cardboard characters, especially his protagonist and narrator D-503, never lift from the ground that they are attempting to rise above. We is of important academic interest if you are attempting to understand the nature of Soviet oppression or the history of dystopic literature. As a work of narrative art, however, it lacks the very thing it fights so hard to defend.
We reads as a series of diary entries, kind of like a blog on vodka and a slow. Recognizing that it was written in 1922, it still brims with a romanticism that seems tired. Remember, this was a year before Edna St. Vincent Millay and T.S. Elliot shocked the world with fresh poetry. Hemingway would publish In Our Time in 1925. My point is, the writing world was alive and there was little room for the pretentious flitting between experimentation and stale artifice that slog from Zamyatin's yawning Edison. Pages gasp with an asthmatic desperation. At the strongest moments, I comic book characters peek around imagination's restless corners, never human beings. In fact, an ambitious graphic novelist might be able to revive Zamyatin's work.
Zamyatin's cardboard characters, especially his protagonist and narrator D-503, never lift from the ground that they are attempting to rise above. We is of important academic interest if you are attempting to understand the nature of Soviet oppression or the history of dystopic literature. As a work of narrative art, however, it lacks the very thing it fights so hard to defend.
