A mixed set of poems that alternately falters and inspires.
Tollyfield expresses feelings of yearning and mourning in her latest poetry collection.
“I think my ring has found another,” writes Tollyfield in a poem about a lost piece of jewelry, “and I should do the same.” The loss of love, coupled with the inability to move on, is a recurring theme; indeed, the ghosts of former lovers seem to haunt every work. Sometimes it’s a literal haunting, as in “Nina,” in which an old flame troubles the narrator’s sleep: “I pray / and I plead / For your ghost to leave, / And slowly but surely, I feel the reprieve.” The “Clean Sheets” of another poem are unexpectedly tragic, as the bed they cover is no longer the site of romance. In “Lemongrass,” the scent of the eponymous plant reminds the speaker of a love far away: “Write back to me with how things are going. The / lemongrass wilted now winter is snowing.” Tollyfield explores other disappointments and humiliations related to the heart; “Plate of Peas” describes a date that goes wrong almost immediately: “I hypothesize / That you were hoping for a man twice my size.” Other poems address a child’s understanding of war, fires seen across a city’s rooftops, and the ancient warrior queen Boudicca. The poem “P’s and Q’s” bristles regarding the expectations that society foists on women: “I’m told that (as a woman) / I should mind my p’s and q’s. // And I do / But I swear / Like a trooper.”
Together, the 28 works provide a conflicted portrait of longing, angst, and self-assertion. Although the poet is no stickler for meter, she structures many of her poems with predictable rhyme patterns, and they sometime feel a bit forced, as in “Plate of Peas.” The verses tend to be at their best when the author leans into their silliness, as in the winking, delightfully unpretentious opening to “Leather”: “If I come back / (And I may never come back), may I be warm to the / touch and tender; / Shacked up in a terraced that’s slender, with a girl and a babe and a blender.” Even stronger are the free verse poems, such as “The Victoria Line,” in which Tollyfield can concentrate on striking lines without chasing rhymes. Too often, the poems rely on vague, abstract, or clichéd imagery—the smell of home, a loving smile, and a bed of dreams all appear in “Gentle Rain,” for instance. The most powerful work in the collection, “Horse d’Oeuvres,” is also the most surprising. An unremarkable opening transitions to a wedding where the speaker and her lover have stolen off to have sex. The hors d’oeuvres that the guests are eating lead to word association that transforms the lovers’ relationship into a metaphorical horse: “And neighed, neighed, collapsing. Thinking, breathing, / feeling — almost gone save opening its eyes and / sighing, ‘once you were mine, once you were mine, once you were mine.’ ”
A mixed set of poems that alternately falters and inspires.Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-78830-794-9
Page Count: 42
Publisher: Olympia Publishers
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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PERSPECTIVES
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