A varied and often engaging, if uneven, set of works about such themes as motherhood, self-esteem, and entropy.
Rhodes-Ryabchich confronts the joys and discouragements of adulthood in this collection of poems.
Poetry often has a documentary quality, reading like a recording of the author’s own experiences. As Rhodes-Ryabchich shows in this collection, poetry can also act as a heuristic tool, showing a speaker thinking her way through her place in the world. The book’s first section is arranged around the theme of single motherhood, and Rhodes-Ryabchich employs the sonnet form as a means of constructing an affirmational worldview. The first poem, “Sonnet for a Single Mother With Daughter,” begins, “I wake each day to joy—I am sexy. / Mother is me, full of love and selful. / I see a miniature me so lovely. / I have love to give—I am so grateful.” The mixed forms of the book’s second section ably explore the many different modes of love, from the breathless excitement captured in free verse to recursive, insistent longings embodied in villanelles. “Overture II” captures the emotional thrall of romance, with each line ending in the same sound: “The dawning Friday sun, Comes / In red, furious light, strummed / By magnificent God’s thumb, / Playing songs in the pink Plum / Cumulus clouds, like a hum / Over a warm, baby’s tum.” The third section, a love letter to the world’s many beauties, is an open-hearted series of odes: to paradise, to reeds, to loneliness, to the poet’s own face. The final section dissects the ravages of disease, be they bodily or societal. Poems touch on the war in Ukraine, the Covid-19 pandemic, police brutality, drug use, and the pitfalls of the American health care system.
Over the course of the collection, the verses vary in terms of quality, and many of the poems have a line to two that don’t land well. In the sonnets, particularly, Rhodes-Ryabchich often leans into the unnatural demands of the form. The inaugural sonnet quoted above, for example, contains the awkward rhymes, “Sometimes I don’t want to be a growncub. / Always I don’t want this to be kill/joy. / I hope your joy can stay in the joyclub. / The red, faint clouds call out to the dreamboy.” The better poems tend to be in free verse, in which the poet seems to revel in the form’s relative lack of constraints, as in the poem “Futuristic Soliloquy”: “I imagine myself to be a healthy peacock / With bright feathers, brilliant / Like neurons, and musically synchronized / To the ping of galaxies, / Radiating in joy, and firing / With billions of star nebulae, / Oozing euphoria deep into space.” Themes of self-love and affirmation pervade the work (one of the sonnets, for instance, is “after Deepak Chopra”), even as the poet grapples with life’s darker and thornier issues. The lines aren’t always virtuosic, but they’re almost always engaging and playful, leaping forward to unexpected references or vibrant images.
A varied and often engaging, if uneven, set of works about such themes as motherhood, self-esteem, and entropy.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2022
ISBN: 9789390601288
Page Count: 81
Publisher: Cyberwit.net
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Breathtakingly magical.
A powerful homage to the natural world, from England by way of Canada.
Combining poetic words (somewhat reminiscent of Mary Oliver’s poetry in their passion for the natural world) with truly stunning illustrations, this unusually beautiful book brings to readers the magic and wonder of nature. This is not a book about ecology or habitat; this is a book that encourages readers to revel in, and connect with, the natural world. Focusing on a particular subject, whether it be animal, insect, or plant, each poem (rendered in a variety of forms) delivers a “spell” that can be playful, poignant, or entreating. They are most effective when read aloud (as readers are encouraged to do in the introduction). Gorgeous illustrations accompany the words, both as stand-alone double-page spreads and as spot and full-page illustrations. Each remarkable image exhibits a perfect mastery of design, lively line, and watercolor technique while the sophisticated palette of warms and cools both soothes and surprises. This intense interweaving of words and pictures creates a sense of immersion and interaction—and a sense that the natural world is part of us. A glossary encourages readers to find each named species in the illustrations throughout the book––and to go one step further and bring the book outside, to find the actual subjects in nature. Very much in the spirit of the duo’s magisterial The Lost Words (2018), this companion is significantly smaller than its sprawling companion; at just 6.5 by 4.5 inches when closed, it will easily fit into a backpack or generously sized pocket. “Wonder is needed now more than ever,” Macfarlane writes in the introduction, and this book delivers it.
Breathtakingly magical. (Poetry. 6-adult)Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4870-0779-9
Page Count: 120
Publisher: House of Anansi Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 23, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Great fun.
The second installment of childhood recollections (after Opposite the Cross Keys, 1988) by mystery writer S.T. Haymon, who here evokes a sheltered 12-year-old's further encounters with life's earthier side.
Haymon's 1920's, upper-middle-class childhood revolved typically around school, home, loyal servants, and a pair of doting, well-educated parents—until age 12, when her father died and her mother decided to move to London. Refusing to accompany her, the precocious, comically self-confident Sylvia tried to limit this series of upheavals by insisting on remaining in Norfolk in the care of a favorite teacher—except that at the last minute her headmistress (already a sworn enemy) switched houses, arranging for two maiden schoolteachers to put Sylvia up in their house instead. Sylvia knew that the Misses Gosse and Locke were eccentric. What she didn't know was that the skinny, aggressive history teacher and the teary, puppy-like math professor were lesbians. Nor did she notice as Miss Locke's increasingly desperate infatuation with her began to lead the entire household toward destruction. Amusing characters abound—the gardener, Sylvia's only ally, whose faith in the value of a virgin's tips on the horse races led him to pay her for advice; the dour housekeeper who sang opera and downed bottles of gin; the art teacher's model who bewildered Sylvia with talk of "randy old dykes"; and the spiritual channel who informed her that her daddy was watching everything she did from heaven. Haymon's depiction of herself as an unusually clever, frequently petulant, and thoroughly practical young girl obsessed with filling her stomach while all sorts of passionate fireworks exploded around her evokes an era when secrets still existed and scandals were bursting to happen—and makes for slyly humorous, very British entertainment.
Great fun.Pub Date: Dec. 14, 1990
ISBN: 312-04986-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
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