Tag: Lullaby of Love

Sundress Reads: Review of Lullaby of Love: Selected Poems

Sundress Reads black-and-white logo with a sheep sitting on a stool next to the words "Sundress Reads." The sheep is wearing glasses and holding a cup filled with a hot drink in one hoof and holding an open book in the other.
A desk with an open laptop, a lamp with a white shade, a document, a pencil holder filled with pens, a mouse, and desk decorations overlook a large window. There are also plants perched on the wall above the desk and glasses on the sill of the window. The overall room is dark and the light outside from the window is the main thing that illuminates the room. Outside the window, it is grey and there is a large tree with branches. There is a distant house behind the branches and a path leading out of the yard. The ground outside the window is a light muted yellow. The words "Lullaby of Love" is typed at the bottom of the image and underneath that in smaller text is "Selected Poems." The author's name "Rebecca Winning" is in large font at the top of the image.

Lullaby of Love: Selected Poems (2025) by Rebecca Winning consists of poems that explore various shades of love and emotions. Winning writes beautifully to take a moment to appreciate the little things in life. The poems are marked with vivid imagery, personification, and metaphors, allowing a glimpse into Winning’s personal reflection of life and the world.

There are many recurring themes throughout Lullaby of Love, including love, hope, loneliness, patience, infidelity, daylight, darkness, and nature. Winning beautifully creates these stories, allowing the reader to visualize each line in great detail and live in that poem for a moment. Winning ties every day tasks and the nature to human feelings, showing how the world and emotions are reflections of each other. Whether Winning is exploring the feelings of infidelity when one is writing a letter to another or the feeling of loneliness after seeing a UFO, each poem is created with great care and fleshed out with beautiful details of the emotions each speaker experiences.

Weather plays a significant role in mirroring human feelings, especially to convey feelings of love. For example, snow is used often to describe warmth and love for another. When “snow dizzies down / in a hush of relentless joy,” the snow is a mirror for the love the speaker feels for another (Winning 59). The speaker “will remember the light and wonder / of loving [them], bringing in wood,” which shows how they will associate snow as this beautiful cozy feeling when remembering loving someone (Winning 59). Winning also explores how two people “were never prepared / for the weather,” drawing a direct comparison to how two people were never prepared to experience the burning emotion of love (Winning 43). And just like how love can become “a blizzard in [one’s] head,” snow can become unpredictably less cozy with the added variable of wind, turning it into a blizzard (Winning 43).

Other extremes of love are explored, such as heartbreak and closure, are delved into, such as in “Fall Housecleaning”. When the speaker cleans up their house, they are actually sweeping their feelings for their former lover “out with a vengeance / and [letting] new sunlight fly around the rooms” (Winning 23). By the end of the poem, the speaker is able to gain closure when a left-behind kazoo “brings the whispers / of strange comfort” (Winning 23). Winning beautifully transitions the act of keeping a seemingly plain object to being able to finally heal one’s heart.

Personification is a steady device used throughout Lullaby of Love to further allow readers to experience peace and take a moment to enjoy the present. Winning writes,

on your couch I learn a dreamless sleep,

and when the window yawns to a morning

all mystical and chaste,

even I awaken into grace. (11)

Here she compares how even windows wake up to slow and peaceful mornings. On a daily basis, many of us do not usually focus on the sound of clocks ticking; however, in the stillness of mornings, we become aware of it “ticking its heart out” (Winning 25). The use of personification throughout Winning’s writing helps readers to stay in the present moment and take notice of everything.

Winning also uses the formatting of stanzas and punctuation to emphasize fear and panic. “2020 Burning” is set during the time of covid and wildfire season. The short stanzas in the poem demonstrate the panic breaking through each line like how one would breathe faster when panic takes over emotions. However, as the poem reads on, ellipsis takes hold with “and yet… / and yet…” like when one takes deep calming breaths to slow down their heart rate. In this case, the ellipsis is a transition from fear to hope. This moment is when the poem’s tone takes a turn. At the end, the periods after “I need to stop. / Breathe.” actually feels like a physical breath the reader is taking with the speaker (Winning 78).

Winning is further able to convey panic when she writes short lines with only commas separating them and they mirror short breaths of air like when one is drowning and trying to gulp it in. She writes,

The glow of my computer

brings bad news in waves,

another death every minute,

dozens lost every hour,

thousands more sickened,

struggling to breathe,

struggling to climb out

of that blue wave

then drowning.

Drowning. (79)

With the one word, “drowning,” the silence becomes loud even through words on a page. Winning is able to create this format that channels the multitude of emotions the speaker feels directly into the readers.

In Lullaby of Love, Winning explores various human emotions and describes them in great creative detail using nature and objects as mirrors. These poems create a ‘lullaby of love’ because they all come together to build a unique, soothing melody of feelings where the reader can laser in on details that are usually overlooked. I, too, am able to take a moment to just breathe and appreciate each small element, like the sun draping over plants or the jangling of keys. It feels like a breath of fresh air to fully live in each poem with the speaker and author, and I am taking what I learned to treasure the present moment in my own life.

Lullaby of Love: Selected Poems is available on Bookshop.org

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Marian Kohng (she/her/hers) is a proud Korean American and an Editorial Intern at Sundress Publications and a Traffic Copy Editor at a local news station in Tucson, AZ. She also has a Bachelor’s in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science and a Master’s in Marketing. She loves to get lost in a good book and will read just about anything, including the back of the shampoo bottle.