Reviews for Paradise lost

The average rating for Paradise lost based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-05-16 00:00:00 Maria Howard History: The Home Movie is a rich and far-reaching attempt both to tell the story of a family and to chronicle the events of a century and a continent in a poem as long as a novel. For me - and as poetry demands so much of the reader, I found it hard to tell whether any failures I found were mine or the poet's - it was a qualified success. History works on several levels. At the micro level (that of individual words, phrases, and images), the book is bursting with invention. Raine is a master of the miniature and his metaphors are almost always innovative (although one condom simile is surely enough!), sometimes beautiful ("the harp of the rain"; bare floorboards "grained like smoked salmon"), often arresting (the "brief cauliflower" of champagne bursting on the bows of a ship; lipstick making "a segment of blood orange" on a glass), and memorably striking even when their subject is banal ("the loofah's shredded wheat"). At the opposite, super-macro level, the poem is a powerful evocation of the sweep of history. Things get murkier in between, though. The individual constituent poems are a mixed bag: some absorb and entrance; some demand to be re-read before they reveal themselves; and some baffle, exasperate, and resist. Where the poems intersect and weave together - the macro level, the level of narrative, where we might expect the book to come closest to being a novel - there is more confusion than coherence; I kept turning back to the family tree at the beginning in search of clarification and connection, and rarely got it. I am sure that there is more to be got from this book: it needs to be read more than once, and I will re-read it... but not just yet.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-10-30 00:00:00 Darlene Nichols Oh man. I had quite a bad reading experience with this book, though in all fairness, that might be much more to do with the weird mental block I've had this month, coupled with my insistence to not juggle more than two books at a time and the Star Wars rabbit-hole down which my brain has fallen, courtesy of Rogue One. The very ambitious scope of this book didn't help my quite distracted reading, which I grabbed in moments over the last month, and as a result I couldn't really get a handle on the narrative or the sprawling family trees, particularly paired with a lot historical and cultural references, not all of which I was familiar with. There were some stunning turns of phrase and images though - the surface of a pond resembling mint sauce, or a wheelchair as an ampersand. Will definitely re-read in future, when my head's a bit less jumbled.