Amazon.com Review
This fine collection of essays, which shifts between personal, scholarly, and universal topics, opens with a tribute to author Jay Parini's mentors, then meanders through talk of small towns, baseball, and writing in restaurants. The centerpiece of
Some Necessary Angels, though, is seven essays about the poetry of William Blake, Theodore Roethke, Robert Frost, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Seamus Heaney, Alastair Reid, Robert Penn Warren, and Charles Wright. Parini comes out the other side of these eloquent examinations to ponder the place of the writer in the world. He calls upon Yeats's poetry and Steinbeck's
Grapes of Wrath as proof that "poetry and fiction make things happen" (the former corresponded to the formation of the Irish Free State; the latter raised consciousness about the plight of migrant workers). He uses examples from his own work to address the issue of blurring lines between biography and fiction.
Parini also uses the book to make a strong case against the isolationism of contemporary literary theory: "Jargon," he writes, "has overwhelmed literary criticism to the point where the so-called common reader is now fiercely excluded from the conversations that take place in most professional journals and academic conferences." It used to be, says Parini, that "the shortlist of major poets from Ben Jonson to T. S. Eliot [was] more or less coincident with the shortlist of major critics." No more. Now, he says, "literature faculties in the United States usually have two camps: the critics and the writers." The critics are "largely out of conversation with the culture of poets and fiction writers," and "the relative ignorance of most poets and novelists with regard to literary theory strikes me as profoundly unhealthy."
From Publishers Weekly
Parini (The Last Station) got his title from a quote by Wallace Stevens extolling "the necessary angel of reality." Without it, says Parini, "we can have no poetry, no imagination, and no politics....We must learn to sit down before reality like small children, open mouthed, attentive. This is the beginning of art." If a combination of awe and actuality makes for good art, it also makes for fine essay writing. Here, Parini has selected essays from the past 25 years that move smartly from the particular to the general. He begins by hooking the reader through personal writings such as appreciations of mentors Alastair Reid, Robert Penn Warren and Gore Vidal, followed by equally elegiac recollections of "Town Life"?at college in St. Andrews and while teaching at Dartmouth and, now, Middlebury College. Having found his study "just too damn quiet," Parini began "Writing in Restaurants," and now spends part of every workday in Calvi's ice cream parlor in Middlebury, where from the porch "that somewhat perilously overhangs Otter Creek and its waterfall, the noise of that waterfall is white noise squared." The second section consists of poetry criticism in the stricter sense?keen insights into, and perceptive excerpts from, Warren, Reid, Robert Frost, Seamus Heaney and Charles Wright. In the last section, Parini covers larger subjects, including his brilliant "Fact or Fiction: Writing Biographies Versus Writing Novels," in which he weaves the Vulgate phrase verbum caro factum est (the word made flesh) into a scintillating essay on the shaping of reality. Eloquent, clear and learned, without being pedantic, these essays provide a voyage into delight.
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