When I came across this novel after my teacher generously gave my eleventh grade English class all of the copies she had purchased with the intent of assigning it as required reading, little did I know the value of the literary gem I had just acquired. The struggle of the brilliant architect, Howard Roark in striving to pursue his passion according to his set of uncompromising standards laid out in each of his projects conflicts with the contemporary expectations of what great architecture should look like and thus places him before the brunt of scorn from the public. But he refuses to sacrifice his own artistic integrity just to bend to their demands or gain wealth. He is the very embodiment of human perfection for he seeks neither to influence nor please others with his work. His is the judge of his own work and sets his own standards. (more…)
Even the language and the speaker falls victim to the flux in Pamela Uschuk’s new collection, Crazy Love, from Wings Press.”I will be the torture rack/that stretches out my own truth,” she writes. Her poetry is both wrought by war and tended for its beauty, both bitter with “regret’s venom” and exuberant with love. After all, “What is the tender palm without the tough skeleton/forming the back of the hand,” she asks in the poem, “Geometry Lesson.” The persistent voice of these poems speaks of the tension of the dance between violence and benevolence, man and woman, nature and humanity, as well as the hesitation after the music has stopped. Here, in Uschuk’s world of encounters, nothing is complete, and everything is moving, extending, reaching, growing. Even the buck, the chickadee, the tigrita lily sway in the gust of Uschuk’s rhythmical words, and the reader has no choice but to follow suit.
It is with an appetite, even after the feast, that Gaylord Brewer writes the poems of Exit Pursued by a Bear, the 2004 collection from Cherry Grove. Beyond the innocuous fruit fetishes, the near pornographic pole beans of “Co-op Girl,” Brewer dines on the ironies of interaction, and likewise, in assuming the authority of speaker, he chooses, with great immediacy and poignancy, what words to swallow, what to leave out of his lyrics. He writes, “and though I believe/I am correct, I couldn’t identify about what.” It is in these silences that the uneasiness, the regret, surfaces much like oil on still water and nudges the reader towards “some saner madness.”
