About the Author:
JON ANDERSON grew up outside of Boston and lived there his first twenty years. “After years,” he says, “of school, travel and work, I eventually settled in Tucson in 1976. I love Tucson; everybody worth talking to looks like they’re on food stamps, and during the summer something in the city explodes every two or three days. These days I’m interested in writing poetry that’s entertaining, good humored, reader-friendly.” Anderson teaches at the University of Arizona and has published six books, including In Sepia and The Milky Way. He has received, among other awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA fellowships and the Shelly Memorial Award for lifetime achievement from the Poetry Society of America.
Review:
“Poetry plays for keeps when it makes human difficulty—even when the human chooses against itself—easier to love. Jon Anderson does just that, by departing from his earlier, immensely grave and graceful poems to something quicker, but just as true, or truer, with an eye for our Toonland times, our gay gloomy imbecilic Prosperous times. At wit’s end he arrives at humor’s beginning: a mind riding Circumstance’s rollercoaster with its old friend the heart taking turns with a handheld camera. In these poems . . . are the verses and versions of a believable, best self: the poem itself: a wanted friend, come through the far side of resignation. Few living poets have as much craft as Jon—enough to keep it subtle, afloat and moving—but his gift is his no-nonsense soul. Now we have his company again, his Day Moon, to make aloneness more companionable, more possible to imagine.” (William Olsen)
“For thirty years Jon Anderson has written the most heart-breaking poems in American poetry, and he has always had a Master’s touch. Now, in his funny, joyous and poignant new collection, Day Moon, he offers us the wisest and wickedest poems of his career. As if the child of some unholy—or perfectly holy—encounter between Li Po and Lenny Bruce, Jon Anderson has become the ‘budding monk’ of one of his new poems, travelling a landscape of saints and hermits, sinners and rakes. It takes a lifetime of devoted wonder to earn the kind of grace and wisdom we find in Day Moon. Jon Anderson is reckoning with the tender absurdities of our lives, and the gifts—the poems—he brings us are truly remarkable.” (David St. John)
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.