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. 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. Maggie Anderson's wonderful collection of new and selected poems, Windfall, possesses a huge, spellbinding, honed acuity and aesthetic certainty. Always cutting to the quick of modern flux, her poems elevate the natural brilliance of small things in our lives, urban and pastoral, or at the heart of a shifting emotional landscape.
Windfall tells an extended story without sacrificing the lyricism of good poetry.
Direct and spare, this volume hits the mark. We can be thankful for this windfall. 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. I love the rhythm, and the knowledge, and the power.