SOURCE: "Stop, Look and Reread," in American Book Review, Vol. 18, No. 1, October-November, 1996, p. 24.

In the following review, Robins discusses what the drawings in Poe's Mother: Selected Drawings of Djuna Barnes, edited by Douglas Messerli, say about society during Barnes's era.

What is style besides being fashion's blood?—a distinctive look, a phrase evocative of a time, an attitude. Douglas Messerli's Poe's Mother: Selected Drawings of Djuna Barnes at first glance is replete with all of the above. Drawn tongue-in-cheek, a stylized Poe's mother as a slightly naughty vision of the 19th-century actress she was, adorns the book's elegant jacket cover and also occupies the next to last page of its more than a hundred drawings, including quick sketches, wood cuts, and black-and-white caricatures all displaying the professionalism and talent of a facile 1920s newspaper reporter/illustrator possessed of no coherent style except for an occasional out and out...