Earlier this year Photo Eye reviewed Yesterday and I neglected to share it on this blog. An oversight on my part especially considering it was one fo the most thoughtful reviews of the book to date and I am so very grateful to Christopher Johnson of Photo Eye who really understood what I was trying to achieve with this work.
“What Kydd has successfully created here, to my mind, is a fixed point. A unchanging and timeless time. A time capsule, even, of the pandemic. But, not in its anxiousness and jarringness, this is not the pandemic of radio buttons and phone scroll throughs and fear… This is the pandemic of slow hours and uncertain waiting. The Pandemic of empty roads. The Pandemic of being startled to hear voices in the dark. The Pandemic of permissive travel notes, that we have printed and resting on the passenger seat, but never think we’ll be called on to use because to interact would be stranger than not to interact. It is the Pandemic of birds in surplus and Nature’s reclamation.
Yesterday is an achievement. It shows us Kydd evolving in her book form. There is a master narrative here, though its something more like Walden than Death on the Installment Plan. The narrative ambles, rather than lurches; it whispers... It is a work of tranquility. A work of silences and deep, unhurried breaths. Yesterday is a set of dream-view goggles to transpose upon your waking eyes. It is, as the narrative itself suggests (you’ll just have to get your hands on one) a window.”
