Bound Stone

Colleen Anderson is a perfect example of authenticity in art. True excitement is triggered by a writer who sees each day as an energy source, and who knows what she came here to do. There's not a single lump under the lines of these sweet dynamic mechanisms about love, loss, nature, and family. Of course we know these are classic scenarios for poetry; but with Anderson the world is given new life. Each poem is a painting we enter, and when we leave we're made different by genuine experience. The quiet voice of Colleen Anderson, with its synoptic pruning of language, leaves us the spectacular hot star of authenticity. That's who she is. -Grace Cavalieri, poet, playwright, and host of The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress Colleen Anderson's wonderful collection of poems, Bound Stone, will have something for everyone. From the tight, delightful lyric poems reminiscent of Kay Ryan to the longer narratives of the natural world akin to Maxine Kumin, Anderson fills her book, and our ears, with the musicality of waterfalls and pianos, birdsong, and human talk. We find sonnets and free verse, traditional and slant rhyme. The themes of love and loss, grief and joy, the comfort of friendship and the changing of seasons, both internal and external, echo through the poems. In "Canoeing in Fog," Anderson notes, "It was dark and bright at once." That's the way it is with these poems. But we're paddling through currents of language, not fog. -Anita Skeen, poet and director of the RCAH Center for Poetry at Michigan State University Colleen Anderson's poems are like spirit houses. With each poem Colleen invites us to enter and consider our place in the world. I say we because the poems are deeply communal and steeped in universal human love and loss. Beautifully crafted and grounded in sensory images-the osprey, the sky, the river, the cloud, the deer-we are buffeted by time, yes, but never lost or alone. Like the bound stone of the title poem I felt marked by water and salt. Read these lyric poems cover to cover and you will be spirited and etched by song. -Jane Vincent Taylor (janevincenttaylor.blogspot.com), author of Pencil Light