Cold Comfort

The beautiful and scruffy where Maggie Anderson grew up should thank her for her fidelity to it, for she's made from that devotion a model of love useful there or anywhere. She's intellectually alert to the lures of comforts and wisdom and emotionally honest enough to want them all the same; she 'holds to her task / in the face of speculation,' as she writes of a grandmother photographed with her arms full of wash. She's funny ('Only responsible people keep cows') and deadly serious. She's one of the ways our poetry has chosen to remind us who we are, and how much choice we had in that, and how little.

Maggie Anderson celebrates the quotidian in her subtly eloquent poems. She write movingly of lives whose privacy and dignity she defends against the self-consciousness of art and the falsification of history. In these close-to-he-earth poems weather becomes density. Hers is a generous vision.

The crux of Maggie Anderson's poems is the strong narrative line, one accompanied by an abundance of lore based in the folkways of the people. And her energy is that very essence of the old stories and poetry—present in the talk of ordinary people.

We are struck by the generosity of a voice that manages to bridge the gap between a personal and a world view, a balance that reveals a narrator who is of the world yet not overwhelmed by it.

She is primarily a poet of moral urgency—a political poet as we say these days—but she is never shrill, relying on the tensions inherent in the natural world rather than rhetoric.