SELECTED REVIEWS FOR
Namedropping
Incisive and irreverent, these tales of a writer’s travels in the literary world intrigue, amuse, and, paradoxically, create a fascinating self-portrait -- warts and all.
-- Kelly Cherry, University of Wisconsin
Richard Elman obviously has had a talent for friendship, especially with writers whose work he admired. He seems to have known or met everyone, from Tillie Olsen and Robert Lowell to Faye Dunaway, and his recollections usually capture something essential or unexpected about them, and finally about himself. Many of his idols were bound to disappoint him, as he sometimes disappoints himself, but his plain-spoken honesty is bracing. The rueful, bittersweet sketch of I.B. Singer is itself worth the price of admission.
-- Morris Dickstein, Distinguished Professor of English, City University of New York
Richard Elman’s Namedropping is the most refreshing of rogues’ galleries, for all its rogues are articulate and accomplished. Here is a memoir in the form of a biography, in the tradition of Ford Madox Ford, another learned and provocative man of letters. Elman is funny, irreverent, and, most of all, generous of heart.
-- William O’Rourke, author of Signs of the Literary Times: Essays, Reviews, Profiles 1970-1992
I think it a remarkable collocation of memories -- an original work of words, as well as a series of sharply limned portraits of those whose names are dropped. Both the narrative vantage deployed and the attitudes displayed are worth disseminating widely; there’s a freshness to the observation even of men and women long dead that brings them to life on the page.
-- Nicholas Delbanco, University of Michigan
The late Richard Elman liked to write against the literary tide. Typically, at a moment when so many writers try to embrace their own images, Namedropping, Elman’s literary memoir, is an album of other people, from Yvor Winters to Little Richard, mostly writers, caught in passing or portrayed full-length. By going his own way, Elman has created something distinctive that belongs on the shelf with John Aubrey’s Brief Lives or shorter pieces in Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets.
-- Lemuel Coley, American Book Review, March/April 1999
The New York Times Book Review, August 23, 1998
On the basis of these astute and entertaining pieces, it's clear that Elman had what Keats called negative capability -- the ability to enter into other people's moral natures while suspending moral judgment -- in abundance....Namedropping is a slight but mostly absorbing collection. On the one hand, it offers some delicious gossip as a form of social history. ... Mingled in with the gossip are tart and satisfying remarks like this one about Hunter Thompson, who once took Elman on a terrifying nighttime motorcycle ride: "All I ever learned from his depictions of Las Vegas and political conventions I knew in kindergarten...."
American Book Review, March/April 1999
The late Richard Elman liked to write against the literary tide. Typically, at a moment when so many writers try to embrace their own images, Namedropping, Elman's literary memoir, is an album of other people, from Yvor Winters-to Little Richard, mostly writers, caught in passing or portrayed full-length. By going his own way, Elman has created something distinctive that belongs on the shelf with John Aubrey's Brief Lives or shorter pieces in Johnson's Lives of the English Poets....And the not-so-famous, even the forgotten get equal time. This range gives Namedropping its distinction....For much of Namedropping is a banquet. So many dishes, so many flavors, courses. So many wonderful characters artfully served up, caught in a line, a gesture.
SELECTED REVIEWS FOR
Cathedral-Tree-Train
Richard Elman's long poem, Cathedral-Tree-Train, is not conventionally poetic, but throughout its searching, melancholic length the heart of poetry is here. Frequently the poem is set free from simple narrative and floats toward the surreal- clearly it is a more vital exactitude of mood that Elman is after. An elegy, it is not so much against death as it is against failures and solitudes, and all the unanswerable questions of our world. Altogether, Cathedral-Tree-Train is fraught, extreme, brave, and beautiful.
-- Mary Oliver, Pulitzer Prize Winner
This ingeniously constructed book begins as melancholy memoir for the years when jazz musicians and abstract-expressionist painters were the risk-fueled heroes of American artists. There's an elegy for a painter friend of the poet, and also for the assumptions about the psychic sources of art by which the painter and period lived and died. The book ends in the present: identity is slithery, aging steady, knowledge tentative and wry. The book is not, finally, the story of anyone's life, but the story of how we suffer and revise the myths we live by. I don't know a book of poems quite like this one.
-- William Matthews
Cathedral-Tree-Train records those times when we have to revise our assumptions, revise and revise again. This can be embarrassing and painful. And it never ends neatly. In this very moving and unusual book, Elman's voice remains persistent and sincere.
-- Julie H. White, The South Bend Tribune
Much of this book concerns a young painter's suicide. In tender and angry poems, Elman questions the reasons for this waste of life and talent. Like an archaeologist, [he] excavates his memories, examining them for clues to understanding. That he does not, at last, understand seems the truest thing in these poems.
-- Pat Monaghan, Booklist
