Reviews for Modern poetry

The average rating for Modern poetry based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-04-08 00:00:00 Sarith Lom It's true, every time I think about this book I tremble in awe and reverence. It's like major parts of the whole thing about how human beings are human are here in its little pages. All that who are you really and anyway who is the I asking this question and what do these marks signify on these pages which apparently relate to people who used to be here but now aren't and why that should matter anyway, don't we have other more pressing concerns like, er, people who are actually alive? But I guess for us bookreaders the distinction between who is alive and who is dead gets very blurry. I know that Mervyn Peake and Raymond Chandler are more alive to me than several members of my family. Now strictly speaking, Mervyn and Raymond are stone cold dead in the marketplace, and my nephews and their broods are all very much alive (although many many miles away from here). But it doesn't seem like they are, it seems like Mervyn and Raymond and a great many others are here in my brain, the voices and the worlds in the pages. I'll go further - Steerpike from Gormenghast and Lorelei Lee from Little Rock, Arkansas are more alive than most people I know. And they never were alive to begin with. This must be wrong. Maybe I should start the medication again. But you know what I mean anyway or you wouldn't be here. This brilliant book is all about why it's important to get the past, someone's life, someone's work, straightened out, but how that's as hard a task as anyone will give you, especially when there are as many versions as there are people remembering. So it's a meta-biography, it's not a biography about Sylvia Plath, it's a biography of other biographies about her, and if that sounds a little convoluted, believe me, it is, but it's completely fascinating. How do we know what we know? I believe Kant or Leibniz or one of those other fictional characters had a word for that. Janet Malcolm has yet more words and I prefer hers, bitter and wonderful as they are.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-08-08 00:00:00 Max Turgeon I found Janet Malcolm's non-biography/biography on the Plath/Hughes estate battles so gripping that I finished it in two sittings. Admittedly, this was not the book I was expecting (thought what I was expecting I'm not entirely sure of), but it read very intimately, very quickly, and very bitingly. Though Malcolm admits on several occasions that she leans on the Hughes "side" of the drama--and she would, seeing as she's cleverly evading the trappings of conventional biographical strictures with this book--she turns a shrewd, and often unkind, eye on all players in the mythology. Malcolm's general premise contends that biographers are vultures; identity-scavengers, if you boil off the academic and scholarly niceties. Biography as a genre attempts to whittle the beautiful and the damned down to their most basic and/or relatable parts--people wish either to see that "Celebs! They're just like us!" OR "Celebs! They're monstrous abortions of human decency!" Or so Malcolm attempts to relate in this book, and thus her alignment with the Hughes family, who have been notoriously difficult to wrangle in biographical enterprises concerning Plath. Do I think biographies are all bad, as Malcolm seems to? No. Do I agree that they necessarily play with the reader's hidden or admitted voyeurism? Sure. But biographies can also be potent insights into historical moments--this is, in fact, why (I think) I'm so drawn to the genre. I was once a minor history buff in high school, and realized I wasn't cut out for it, deciding to play to my strengths--and real passions--instead, in literature. Biography, for me, is a way to make contact with history through a palatable entry point--a person, a figure that concretizes the abstractions of history (which is itself in many ways mere narrative, just as biography is) and brings that abyss of moments and experiences to vibrant life. So the foundations of the book make sense to me, even where I veer off Malcolm's path. And certainly, the drama reads as good as any fiction. There are all the main players: the evasive Bluebeard figure (Teddy boy); the wicked crone (Olwyn); the disoriented octogenarian (Professor Thomas); both the neurotic and the wily academic (Anne Stevenson & Jacqueline Rose, respectively), among others. It's all a high tragedy deployed ostensibly to dispel the high tragedy that's surrounded Plath & her circles since that chilly February morning of 1963. At any rate, an invaluable tool for anyone interested in Plath, Hughes, or the post-mortem drama staged between them and the reading public, as well as critics. Also a fascinating meta-narrative on biography that should be interesting for basically any curious reader. Highly recommended.