USA

Maggie Anderson: WINDFALL: New and Selected Poems,
University of  Pittsburgh Press, ISBN 0-8229-5719-1, $12.95, 110 pgs.

This book provides the best of three of Maggie Anderson’s past books with poems from YEARS THAT ANSWER, COLD COMFORT, and A SPACE FILLED WITH MOVING. And as if that were not enough, she presents us with an ample collection of new poems. Praise for Anderson’s work is strong--Yusef Komunyakaa dubs it “spellbinding,” Alicia Ostriker lauds her as “a poet of conscience and courage,” Gwendolyn Brooks as “a shining sanity,” Gerald Stern as a voice that “made a new world come to life.”

Part I takes us into the poet’s experience of nature that runs from the simplest perceptions of rain through to grieving a father’s death. “Body and Soul” opens the book with "I have waited for this storm/as if for the one great love of my life and ends the section with Doing what needs doing,/ I’m dancing alone/in this warm and brassy/evening sun going down" which is a perfect segue into Part II’s poetry of place that seem to whisk the reader right up into the sky for a bird’s eye view of West Virginia, its hills and back roads and lines of trees, yet with an intimacy with those who people them. Part III--with its country fiddles, plowed fields, creek banks--takes the reader into the pulse of work and the lack of it with the rise and fall of industrialization in Ohio and Pennsylvania: "...Neighborhoods laced/the hillsides, through detours and freeway/construction around the inclines and concrete cubes, /circuiting the long walls of old mines buried under/ the gray Carnegie libraries and the universities,/ the closed mills and the steaming slag piles...the tough, sweet city of the workers." And the last section of new poems gives us one powerfully honest moment after the other from “Knife” that announces "...The knife I always carry in my pocket was/ meant to save me from you. Now it is/transformed and I am holding not a shield/ but a sword, not protection but a weapon..." on to “Literary” that confesses "The first poems I read as if/ they were printed on the wings of moths...in love with my own ignorance/ and even in “Self-Portrait” that looks at the poet herself as "...far outside the frame, beyond/the pale, lost in the margins, smudged/ like a fingerprint..." but she is not so ambiguous; she is a poet with a keen eye who adeptly reveals to us what and how she sees as a poet of memory and metaphor who graciously takes the time to write it down for us.

© Copyright, Andrena Zawinski.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.