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Houses, flowers, dogs, foxes, country music, families, poverty, love, anger and grief are only some of the subjects that this book fills out with closely observed details of day-to-day life. Evoking the landscape and struggles both of town and country in the Appalachian region, this collection includes poems from among Anderson's first three books, along with new work. Poems from Years That Answer focus on learning and growing up, before and after a father's death. Those from Cold Comfort expand that personal outlook to take in the history of the poet's family and the hard life of West Virginia mining towns, while the choices from A Space Filled with Moving contain more extended meditations, including what may be Anderson's finest poem, "Long Story", with its shocking final stanza. With an understated irony, as well as a broad compassion sometimes moved to anger, Anderson's poems reflect an intimate and loving knowledge of the world they evoke, and earn their frustrations honestly. Taken as a whole, however, the poems are largely limited to themes and emotional terrain handled more memorably in the work of other poets, and Anderson's cautions presentations often stall in overly mundane language. This is most apparent in the new poems, which are weighted toward the vicissitudes of academic and artistic life. While it may still be possible to write memorable verse about dogs, arts colonies and European vacations, the poems here lack originality and compelling insight.
About the author
Maggie Anderson is the author of three previous collections of poetry,
Years That Answer,
Cold Comfort, and
A Space Filled with Moving, editor of
Hill Daughter: New and Selected Poems of Louise McNeill, and co-editor of
A Gathering of Poets, and
Learning by Heart: Contemporary American Poetry about School, Maggie Anderson has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. She teaches creative writing at Kent State University where she directs the Wick Poetry Program and edits the Wick Poetry Series through the Kent State University Press.
Summary
A selection of poems from three previous books as well as new work, Anderson writes out of deep grief for the political losses of work and money. A counterpoint to the sorrows in these poems is a wry, self-deprecating humor which saves the work from solemnity.
