Customer Reviews

The Happiness of this World

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4 star:		(1)
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Karl Kirchwey's best poems do a thought-provoking job of enhancing things by placing them next to each other and letting us notice how differences grow into linkages. I am especially fond of "Reading Akhmatova", in which a child's speech therapy runs through a book of the Russian poet's far-from-childish words and themes. We adults hear things in Akhmatova -- this poem has a literariness that seems typical of Kirchwey's work -- that clangs against the child's innocent enunciation of the words. The "widening diction of experience" evoked here is one of those rare lines (in modern poetry) with staying power for me -- it has resonated with me for weeks.

My favorite part of the book, though, is the prose memoir "A Yatra for Yama", in which the poet journeys through Asia on missions that prove interconnected in the subtle way that the best memoirists' stories do. It's instructive without being didactic, eloquent without being bombastic, and gentle without being slow. And the family story (about the namesake uncle killed in the crash of his plane during the WWII battle for Saipan) is a very compelling one.

(Disclosure: I know Professor Kirchwey, who has taught some of my former students.)

i was happy to see that prose had been integrated into "The Happiness of this World," Kirchwey's latest work. it's his most readable book so far, in my opinion. the intimate historical details of his family are fascinating, really draw the reader in. and the poems here have the best of his earlier stuff- shining with original & stunning phrases, in addition to, finally for me, a fathomable magic. though is the ending here too quaint and kind of a letdown? i had that impression at first, others may disagree.

anyway, i think i'll go back to his earlier books, too, since hopefully i'm smarter now than i was when i read them so many years ago-- lol :) seriously, he's undeniably good, but a rigorous intellectual through and through. not for literary lightweights.

I was very moved by the prose memoir, A Yatra for Yama - especially the first few sections that dealt with the author's uncle (who died in his early 20s in WWII), his father, and his grandmother. Amazing how a family's history lives with and continues to shape and affect one's personal life and outlook.

In the latter sections, the journey ('yatra') made by the author to see his brother, who lives in a monastry in Northern India was no doubt a very personal one although it was difficult for me to feel the connection at times... but I loved the way it ended. We all have to define our individual spaces and destinies for ourselves.

Did not get around to reading or enjoying the poems.