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Windfall
New and Selected Poems
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by Maggie Anderson
University of Pittsburgh Press
Due/Published
April 2000, 112 pages,
paper
ISBN
0822957191
Windfall includes poems from three previous books by Maggie Anderson, along with a generous selection of new work. In this collection we can see over two decades of the growth of a poet memorable for the clarity, strength, and urgency of her voice. Anderson's poems entangle a language, a history, and a group of belongings, and she is both at home and a foreigner in the places she invokes. Every place in these poems seems inhabitable, yet the tensions of these deceptively quiet lines develop out of the clear reluctance or inability of the poet to sit still. Maggie Anderson writes out of deep grief for the political losses of work and money, of life and limb and home in our dangerous times. She remembers and witnesses, and she also speaks eloquently for our private griefs-the loss of family, vitality and self. These poems do not shout; we listen as if following a whisper in the dark. A counterpoint to the sorrows in these poems is a complex and often joyous music, as well as a wry, sometimes self-deprecating humor which saves the work from solemnity. Her rhythms are diverse and intricate; they move deftly from fiddle whine to saxophone, from fugue to blues. "I love the voice I hear in Maggie Anderson's poems. I love the rhythm, and the knowledge, and the power. She has made a new world come to life. She has, through memory and passion, helped keep the world itself alive."--Gerald Stern "Maggie Anderson writes a serious, surmising poetry, a poetry knowledgeable of image and music, pieces of energy of taut string, and shining sanity."--Gwendolyn Brooks "Maggie Anderson has been a poet of energy and wisdom, of conscience and courage, since her earliest work. In this new collection I am particularly impressed by the cropped force of poems like Knife, The Sleep Writer, and the Black Dog poems, which chillingly convey private and public worlds of terror and control. Caught between the oppositions of decorum and lawlessness, indolence and rigor, spiced by secrecy and appetite, Anderson is a poet who confronts loss and dread and, like the black dog, despite the grey fog, stands up."--Alicia Ostriker |
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