Double Standards

Julie Rekai Rickerd is a Toronto broadcaster and public relations
consultant.

Lola Lemire Tostevin’s poems in Double Standards demonstrate the poet’s ease with style and structure in both French and English. Both languages are used to convey her many interests in life and its emotions as viewed through actual language. She cleverly plays with words to illustrate her ideas in clear, concise, and expressive terms. She defines and uses parts of speech to express feelings of love. She tackles the issues of creation and destruction using vivid and relevant imagery for emphasis.

Tostevin carefully scrutinizes her surroundings and translates the world around her into a unique and very personal language. She experiments with a variety of styles and structures to find the perfect fit for the spectrum of her concerns and reactions. Her rhythm changes according to mood and subject at hand.

Tostevin deals with the world in which she lives, relates it to the past through history and to the present through her personal experience. She is as concerned about her child’s reaction to violence as with her own queries of who and what she might be and where she came from.

Tostevin explores many poetic forms, from prose poetry to blank verse, in her analysis of the physical and spiritual world she inhabits. Her retention of her own very personal style amidst her exploration of form and feeling results in a most satisfying and thought-provoking collection of poetry.