Quiver - Softcover

Nathalie Anderson

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0966917782 ISBN 13: 9780966917789

Publisher: Penstroke Press, 2011

Synopsis

Nathalie Anderson's third
and most thematically wide-ranging collection of poetry, published by Penstroke Press in Rochester, Vermont. Available through Schenkman Books.

About this title

About the Author

Poet and librettist, Nathalie Anderson, teaches at Swarthmore College, where she is a Professor in the Dept. of English Literature, and directs the Program in Creative Writing. The author of two previous volumes of poetry: FOLLOWING FRED ASTAIRE, which won the 1998 Washington Prize from THE WORD WORKS, and CRAWLERS, which received the 2005 McGovern Prize from Ashland Poetry Press. She has also collaborated on three operas with the composer Thomas Whitman and Philadelphia's Orchestra 2001: THE BLACK SWAN; SUKEY IN THE DARK; and an operatic version of Arthur Conan Doyle's A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA. Her poems have appeared in ATLANTA REVIEW, DOUBLE TAKE, NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW, THE RECORDER, and THE NEW YORKER. A 1993 Pew Fellow, she serves currently as Poet in Residence at the Rosenbach Museum and Library.

Review

QUIVER is Nathalie Anderson's most thematically wide-ranging and formally ambitious work to date. Underlined throughout by music, this collection is a many-sided reclamation of place and an invigorating account of how we relate to the various physical, familial, moral, sexual and literary landscapes we encounter as we grow in experience of the world. Along the way, we are treated to accounts of a Southern girlhood, of time spent in England and, in some of the best poems ever written by an American poet about Ireland, explorations of life in remote Irish places. QUIVER, elegant and racy, is a work of great complexity and rare beauty that marks Nathalie Anderson as one of our finest poets. --Eamonn Wall

Think of Nathalie Anderson's QUIVER as the bouquet of arrows the poet draws from, her powerful ammunition of word and song. It's the bow's burr on the hoarse strings in the gorgeous SLOW AIRS, a husky whisper, whiskey throated. It's also the body's reverberation, honed from memory and longing, zinging to life in poem after poem, exuberant, sumptuous, and dazzling. --Elaine Terranova

Out of the pine straw, gentility and heat of a Southern girlhood, Nathalie Anderson has managed bravely to name some of the unnameables of human experience. She is a writer for whom it is inevitable that the pleasures of language and the pleasures of the body are revealed to be in some measure identical, even if (as in her poem SQUEEZE) a love affair with Sleep should lead inevitably to a double date with Sleep's older brother Death. --Karl Kirchwey

This wide-ranging volume takes its reader into both the American South and across Ireland, in visceral poems that, indeed, quiver with energy... QUIVER responds as a volume which traverses time and geography with a sure-footed language that accommodates its many shifts from exterior to interior experience.... As she is an accomplished librettist, it is unsurprising that Anderson's poems are intensely musical... One of the more striking aspects of QUIVER, however, is not its musicality but its textures--the many fabrics whose warp and weft weave through the poems.--Anna Teekill --Irish Literary Supplement Fall 2013

Out of the pine straw, gentility and heat of a Southern girlhood, Nathalie Anderson has managed bravely to name some of the unnameables of human experience. She is a writer for whom it is inevitable that the pleasures of language and the pleasures of the body are revealed to be in some measure identical, even if (as in her poem SQUEEZE) a love affair with Sleep should lead inevitably to a double date with Sleep's older brother Death. --Karl Kirchwey

About this edition

• Publisher: Penstroke Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0966917782
• ISBN 13: 9780966917789
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 94
• Editor: Ann Aspell
• Illustrator: Perky Edgerton