About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Thom Gunn, Ed. Clive Wilmer
Rave The Kenyon Review Clive Wilmer...is Gunn’s most devoted and judicious, perceptive and illuminating critic. The sources for his extensive introduction and notes include Gunn’s unpublished papers, notebooks, diaries, and letters in the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. But Gunn’s poetic mine is so rich with allusions and echoes, which enhance and fortify his work, that more ore can still be found ... This valuable edition places Gunn with the finest postwar British poets: Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill.
James Atlas
Pan The Los Angeles Times His biography was unremittingly negative and his moral judgments portrayed him as superior to his subject. Atlas is least interesting in the present book when he talks about himself and tries to disguise his egoism and arrogance with a veneer of mock modesty ... The Shadow in the Garden has no clear structure. Atlas was urged to follow chronology and avoid a meandering narrative. But he has no table of contents, chapter titles or preface to guide the reader through his chaotic work. He jumps around like a demented frog, returning to the same subjects in different chapters and dropping derivative sketches of Greek and Roman historians into the middle of the book. Hundreds of pointless and irritating footnotes force the reader to jump between two parallel texts ... Atlas, who can’t quite break free from his subject, ends his book with a description of his own life that inadvertently recalls the sad end of Schwartz. The writer took out his garbage, suffered a heart attack and died in the elevator of a seedy Times Square hotel. Atlas carries his garbage bag out to the hall, pushes the button of the elevator and hurries back to his apartment before something terrible happens to him.
John Stubbs
Rave The Los Angeles Times John Stubbs, an English schoolteacher in Slovenia who deserves a position in Oxbridge, has written the best of the many lives of Swift. He has mastered the complex historical background that defined Swift’s life, judiciously examined the conflicting evidence, and produced an intelligent and elegantly written book.