MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewHiggs’s Blake is not the tripped-out proto-hippie of some renderings, nor is he a Blake for everyone — although Higgs, despite his book’s pugilistic title and his close examination of many of the major quarrels in Blake’s life, sometimes presents a suspiciously conciliatory portrait of a poet who, he says, \'accepts all sides.\' A glance at Blake’s annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds’s discourses shows how scathingly he could reject ideas he knew to be appalling; a quick reading of his damning poem London would do the job, too. Higgs’s Blake is, instead, a Blake for anyone whose sensibilities harmonize with Higgs’s interests in neuroscience and quantum mechanics, Star Wars analogies, and discussions of Carl Jung and Eckhart Tolle ... How others will receive the book may well depend on where they sit on the innocent-to-experienced continuum. To me, Higgs often comes across as a bewilderingly innocent reader of Blake, his ear untuned to the poet’s frequencies of irony and humor and to the interpretive and emotional possibilities they extend. But Higgs’s writing is consistently clear and confident, even when he is wrong ... Higgs is more convincing when writing about Blake’s knotty and paradoxical views on the natural world, and when he underscores the essential, pervasive sexuality in Blake’s output ... t times, his protracted ruminations on sciences and philosophies took me farther from Blake rather than closer to him, and his profusion of pop-culture pings felt superfluous ... At other times, it was fun to witness Higgs’s cogs turning, to hear his thoughts ricocheting against the walls of his internal archive of affinities, allusions and absorptions. His tone is measured, but Higgs does not cease from mental fight in his earnest quest to understand and explain a mind that, he writes, is perhaps \'too big a mind for us to ever properly grasp.\' Maybe that’s why, when I came to the end of his book, I felt I’d learned more about the mind of John Higgs than that of William Blake.
Yehuda Amichai, ed. Robert Alter
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe useful and beautiful poetry of Yehuda Amichai can make much happen: It might just make us more compassionate, and more humane, for having read it.
