Big Books: Part 3

Cutty, One Rock: Low Characters and Strange Places, Gently Explained

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 168 pp., $19

August Kleinzahler is an award-winning poet, but he does something astonishing in this book of nine autobiographical essays: He takes the form and makes it seem his own invention. The slender volume documents Kleinzahler's life from boyhood to manhood from a seasoned, wry perspective that is intimate and candid but never mawkish or sensational. The portraits of his mildly crazed but impeccably mannered parents early in the book are riotous, but the things really take flight with "East/West Variations." As a personal geography of places he's called home, Kleinzahler captures with astonishing clarity the "spasms of memory" that propel all writers, dreamers, and other outsiders to leave what they know in search of what they are to be. In this, and especially in "Eros & Poetry," Kleinzahler reveals himself as a man of letters and an avid observer of the world. But it is his depictions of individuals, from his parents, one-time lovers, surly bartenders, and finally, his stunning essay about his adored brother in the book's title essay, that Kleinzahler makes an indelible mark. Lovely, elegiac, hilarious, and oh so stylish, Cutty, One Rock is an exquisite read.