It’s not unusual for a writer – or indeed a reader – to be obsessed with the life of Alice in Alice in Wonderland (and Through the Looking Glass, of course). My first thought when picking up Stephanie Bolster’s debut collection White Stone was what on earth can be said new about this girl, this woman, this icon? Alice Liddell (1852-1934) sat for Charles Dodgson’s camera and inspired the Alice books that prompted Dodgson’s rise to fame as Lewis Carroll. Surely everything that has to be written about Alice has already been written.

However, I was quite wrong about this, for where else but in Bolster’s collection of Alice poems could one come across something as affecting as these lines from “St. Agnes”: “Today the shutter’s snapped you in. / Through a hole you see a light, a girl / in white. Is this your dream? / She cannot be the answer.”

Bolster follows Liddell through her life as child, young girl, married woman, and mother right up to her old age: “By the end you are that crone / it’s said all women become…” (“Portrait of Alice as an English Landscape”).

A sad ending indeed for the immortal child named Alice. But Bolster happily doesn’t leave her there. For what of the fantastic heaven she has in store for her heroine? “Portrait of Alice with Elvis” shows us Wonderland and Graceland melded. This funny and delightful poem is perhaps the culmination of the collection. Here Alice (and Elvis) manage to retain the glory of childhood, which is undoubtedly the chief appeal of the Alice stories. “…Both delight / in their limited edition collector’s plates,” writes Bolster.

Bolster provides us with a short biography of Liddell and also a bibliography that attests to her exemplary research into her subject. But simple research is of course not enough for such a work. In the end it is the poet’s sympathy with her subject that makes these pieces so appealing.