Anne Shaw lives in Chicago, Illinois.
Dido in Winter: Poems
by Anne Shaw
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- ISBN-13: 9780892554294
- Publisher: Persea Books
- Publication date: 03/10/2014
- Pages: 80
- Product dimensions: 5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.40(d)
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Driven by a resolute sense of exploration, these exquisite poems excavate both physical and emotional landscapes.This collection is a mapping of the senses, in which rapture and disillusionment shadow each other, reflecting a world "where sun swirls on the rock-face by the spring/moving its blue and yellow hands/then vanishing." It is a book searching for truth beyond beauty by a poet who shines increasingly bright. Anne Shaw is also the author of Undertow (Persea 2007).
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Publishers Weekly
08/04/2014Shaw (Undertow) marks with a sharp eye and a fine ear this technically astute and pleasingly varied—if sometimes overwrought—set of personae, verse-letters, and poems of spiritual meditation and romantic love. She has a way with the single image, making icons out of casual observations ("Bright amnesiac instance,/ little red thread on my jeans") and has fun with impersonations, as Virgil's abandoned Queen Dido of Carthage exchanges verse apologias with Hans Christian Andersen's little match girl. Other poems pursue Eros and agape through unanswered cries and through filmic scenes: "Shapes of birds on the river. Slight backscatter of snow"; "As if in simple ransack, gin-light/ snapping backwards in the sky." Passionate and unafraid of artifice, Shaw "will drop ink on your tongue to be sure you speak no ill/ till the workmen come with leather in their hands." The collection is notable for its variety of free-verse shapes: extended lines, choppy ones, monostichs, quick digressions, long looks at "how strangely things unmoor themselves," and even a play on sentences from Gertrude Stein. More skeptical readers may wonder what sets these points of view apart from other poetry on the same topics, and whether there is a subject, a stance, or a claim about language and life that Shaw has yet to make her own. (Apr.)
Gretchen Marquette - Rain Taxi Review of Books
At no point does the reader feel as if this is a collection of objectspersonal to the speaker. [Shaw] seems to have made enough room for thereader, so long as we sit nearby....Each poem is beautiful and carefully wrought, but this book is bestappreciated when read slowly, a section at a time. When Shaw’splay with language clicks with her romantic imagery, the pay-offis wonderful.Library Journal
04/15/2014In this second collection from Lexi Rudnitsky First Prize winner Shaw, the poet mourns lost love with such ferocity that reading feels like an invasion—and it almost hurts. "How much I miss/ our bodies," says the title poem. "I can survive the damn insipid sky/ but not the way I smolder." Not cathartic but meant to plunge one deep into grief; raw, sentient, real.—BH