Heavy emphasis on rhyming and simplistic subject matter will leave readers unsatisfied.
A young woman’s poems about nature, relationships and growing up.
The milestones and emotional tumult of early adulthood are well-traversed territory in poetry and literature. The work of classic heavyweights like Emily Dickinson and contemporary writers like Bret Easton Ellis touches on this trying time of life; additional examples of coming of age on the page are only as far away as the nearest creative writing course. Like multitudes before her, Scheidemann records her thoughts on love, nature and revelations about adulthood. Unlike many others, however, she infuses these musings with a streak of poetry devoted to cocoa-based food items, such as “Chocolate,” in which she writes, “Sweet, sweet chocolate—so sweet / You won’t ever fail to leave me / Such a lovely treat / Which always makes me full of glee.” “Brownie,” meanwhile, describes the eponymous delectible as “Brown colored / Really delicious / Often a favorite dessert.” Moving on to more weighty topics with “Shyness,” Scheidemann tackles adolescent awkwardness: “My shyness at first / Prevents me from things I want to do / Makes me feel cursed / And blue.” Her poetry varies widely in theme yet is simplistic in scope. She places primary focus on rhyming stanzas—a poetic style that lends itself better to children’s poetry rather than the young-adult audience she appears to address with poems about graduation and romantic heartache. While the poet’s enthusiasm is clearly evident, this collection reads more like a portfolio ripe for workshopping or the culmination of notebook musings and penned daydreams. As an aspiring author, Scheidemann would benefit from delving deeper into her subject matter, forgoing strict adherence to rhyming structure and further refining her writing skills.
Heavy emphasis on rhyming and simplistic subject matter will leave readers unsatisfied.Pub Date: June 16, 2011
ISBN: 978-1456462727
Page Count: 62
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Wise, kind and lively verse that truly “dances to a tune that’s / gloriously redeeming / of anger, hate, and envy. / It’s an...
Engaging lyric poetry that manages to be sensual and cerebral, fun and profound.
Readers willing to dig deeper than the work of poets Derek Walcott, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Anthony Joseph will find that exciting new worlds of Caribbean poetry await. Although some lesser-known Caribbean writers tend to get bogged down in the exotic fecundity of their island landscapes, others write with a grace and steadiness that highlights personal experience within the larger context of culture and environment to reveal something universal. Trinidadian novelist, painter and poet Drayton (The Crystal Bird, 2012, etc.) most decidedly falls into the latter category. Her personal poems often focus on singular moments in her past, yet her evocation of the slippage between past and present, of how we manage to exist in both times simultaneously, speaks directly to readers. The exploration of how “time…magically overlaps generations” pervades this collection. Her narrators are buffeted by nostalgia but are never fatalistic or cloying; instead, they treasure the past and the present as a single fabric of interwoven threads. One narrator, for instance, revisits a memorable beach and finds that the “scenery I knew has all but gone, / except for the sea. / Longing and waiting, I dream of the days / that never can be again. / The sea waits while I dream a dream / where I stand on the balcony of this precious day.” Drayton invests symbols with a similar complexity; the titular brown dove, for instance, is at once a symbol of maternal devotion, sexual allure, rebellion and quiet endurance, and is rife with gender and racial resonances. Occasionally, her more contemplative poems suffer from excess erudition, and she is sometimes prone to distracting alliteration, but she also delivers unmatched similes such as, “The morning stormed my day / like a drunken party crasher / with streams of gold and white ribbons / coming through the window.”
Wise, kind and lively verse that truly “dances to a tune that’s / gloriously redeeming / of anger, hate, and envy. / It’s an awesome authority / with boundless energy.”Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2012
ISBN: 978-1478160045
Page Count: 120
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A colorful portrait of the rhythms and textures of Zonian life, with little investigation of the underlying politics.
An evocative account of growing up in the Panama Canal Zone during the last years of U.S. control over the key waterway.
Deep in the Panamanian jungle, the Panama Canal Zone was a small slice of America, where U.S. workers employed in operating and maintaining the key isthmian waterway lived with their families. In 1970, about 45,000 “Zonians” lived amid a total Panamanian population of 1.5 million. Judy Haisten’s poignant memoir describes her experience growing up a Zonian between 1964 and 1977—the year President Jimmy Carter signed the treaty ending U.S. control over the canal. For Haisten, the Zone was a tropical paradise in which “[l]ife patterns...were planned, organized, and structured, while the jungle promised chaos, confusion, spontaneity.” With wry humor and vivid detail, she presents a series of Zonian-life vignettes, from dodging bats in the only movie theater in her town to chasing a stray parrot, staring down a crocodile and running away from a boa constrictor. Her prose is as steamy as the humid Panama climate: “Mealy water bugs” skim the surface of a pond where alligators breed, and “[f]oamy masses of frog eggs [float] close to the bank.” There are also visits to the primitive settlements of two indigenous tribes, including the half-naked Choco Indians. “I felt as if I had stepped into the pages of the National Geographic magazines we received at home in the mail,” Haisten recalls. The idyll ends abruptly with the canal treaty, under which the Zone, as a political entity, ceased to exist on Oct. 1, 1979. “America had lost a piece of herself,” Haisten laments, her dreams of raising her own children in the Zone dashed. But like the water bugs, the author skims the surface: Her focus on Zonian life is so tight that she doesn’t explore the palpable tension of the U.S. presence in Panama, which was established under a 1903 treaty that many Panamanians viewed as imperialistic. The host country is just “a welcome part of our lives,” while her encounters with Panamanians are limited to her family’s housekeeper, bus drivers and salesmen at an auto dealership she visits with her mother. She chastises President Carter for going back on his word to protect Zonians, but she fails to acknowledge that they always lived in Panama on borrowed time.
A colorful portrait of the rhythms and textures of Zonian life, with little investigation of the underlying politics.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2012
ISBN: 978-1614930853
Page Count: 290
Publisher: The Peppertree Press
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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