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
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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