A transportive, serenely macabre collection of poems on the afterlife of things.
Robinson’s debut poetry collection seeks the wisdom of nature in things living and dead.
Nature may be red in tooth and claw, but that doesn’t make it any less appealing to the amateur naturalist. The observant speaker in these poems sees herself in the chaos and precarity of the natural world. As she laments in the title poem, “I am as human as the mother / who birthed me, who left me / a story where I featherstitch wings / to a page without a field guide to identify / who I am or where I’m flying.” Birds—particularly dead birds—litter the pages of this volume. A gull explodes like a pinata after being hit by a truck. A yellow rail has its legs cut off by a mower. “Of course, the death of the bird isn’t the point,” says the poet of the latter. “The point has to be the bird’s life: what it saw, / and who saw it while flying so blessedly damaged” (“Because of Beatitude”). Birds aren’t the book’s only casualties; a dead opossum wriggles with maggots, animate even in death. A washed-up jellyfish brings joy to the poet, who tries to examine it without deflating it. The dead do not give up their ability to converse; indeed, the continued existence of their bodies seems to reveal as many truths about the natural world as creatures still living. The poem “Wing in the Freezer” describes a curio given to the speaker by a hunter friend: the wing of a blue-winged teal. “I’m vegan, / but he knew I had a freezer of berries / and dead birds. The birds are for science. / The berries are for me. I don’t feed the dead, / but last night I spoke with them.” In poem after poem, the speaker asks the reader to help her find meaning in what remains.
The author writes with a sharp eye and a musical ear—she is just as much at home in the narrative as she is in the lyrical. She considers the “Body of the Great Blue Heron,” that most majestic of American wading birds: “Heron’s got a body / of hollow bones. What lives inside that space? / Is that where the soul lives, in whatever cavity / it can find? Is that our soul when we’re alone that thuds / in our chest against the breastbone?”The short lyric “Self-portrait in Fragments” reads like the object labels for a personal museum case: “bluff of bone, / nest of hair, / breath from the buzz of bees — / forest of scars, / drainpipe throat, / manic mess of puberty —” Though most of the poems orient themselves in the animal world, it isn’t difficult to discern the human stories lurking between the lines of grief and trauma, aging and regret. In “Where the Goldfinch,” a teenage girl latches on to a bird’s song in order to transport her out of a distressing situation, learning “to match the rhythm, / to no longer long, to leave the body / and fly to the branches, sing so quietly / the song fades instead of crashes.”
A transportive, serenely macabre collection of poems on the afterlife of things.Pub Date: May 9, 2023
ISBN: 9780991378098
Page Count: 84
Publisher: Unbound Edition Press
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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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