Ohio University Press, 2018 Paper: 978-0-8214-2317-2 | eISBN: 978-0-8214-4631-7 Library of Congress Classification PS3601.N5438A6 2018 Dewey Decimal Classification 811.6
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC
ABOUT THIS BOOK
In Doubtful Harbor, Idris Anderson turns wandering into art. From large landscapes to the minutest details, she seeks with each poem to convey the world more clearly, acutely, and exquisitely. As she meditates on indelible moments with intimate others, friends, and strangers, she teases from these encounters their elusive connections and disconnections. As Sherod Santos wrote when selecting the book for the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, “These are not the journeys of a tourist, but of a wandering solitaire whose purpose is not to maintain a travelogue, but to lose herself in the otherness of her surroundings.”
Doubt is itself a driving force here, an engine of both questing and questioning. As exact as Anderson’s eye is, her poems draw energy from ambiguity as she renders interior and exterior landscapes—foreign and domestic, lovely and littered, familiar and strange.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Idris Anderson’s first book, Mrs. Ramsay’s Knee, was selected by Harold Bloom for the May Swenson Prize. Anderson has also won a Pushcart Prize and the Yeats Society of New York Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in AGNI, The Hudson Review, Paris Review, Southern Review, ZYZZYVA and other journals. Born and raised in Charleston, South Carolina, she has lived for more than two decades in the San Francisco Bay area.
REVIEWS
“Where Bishop’s art tended to be on the threshold between the visual and the visionary, Anderson’s swerve from her great precursor adheres to the visual, and yet teases from it what can be seen as an intimation at once immanent and transcendental.”—Harold Bloom
“Doubtful Harbor charts an intrepid journey to regions as remote as Shanghai, Fiesole, the Peloponnese, an orchard in Macedonia, a silk factory in Suzhou … Watched over by the guardian spirits of Elizabeth Bishop and Virginia Woolf, Anderson writes with the passion and uncanny precision of a poet in full possession of her powers. Doubtful Harbor is a uniquely accomplished book by a uniquely talented poet. A wonderful achievement.”—Sherod Santos
Ohio University Press, 2018 Paper: 978-0-8214-2317-2 eISBN: 978-0-8214-4631-7
In Doubtful Harbor, Idris Anderson turns wandering into art. From large landscapes to the minutest details, she seeks with each poem to convey the world more clearly, acutely, and exquisitely. As she meditates on indelible moments with intimate others, friends, and strangers, she teases from these encounters their elusive connections and disconnections. As Sherod Santos wrote when selecting the book for the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, “These are not the journeys of a tourist, but of a wandering solitaire whose purpose is not to maintain a travelogue, but to lose herself in the otherness of her surroundings.”
Doubt is itself a driving force here, an engine of both questing and questioning. As exact as Anderson’s eye is, her poems draw energy from ambiguity as she renders interior and exterior landscapes—foreign and domestic, lovely and littered, familiar and strange.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Idris Anderson’s first book, Mrs. Ramsay’s Knee, was selected by Harold Bloom for the May Swenson Prize. Anderson has also won a Pushcart Prize and the Yeats Society of New York Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in AGNI, The Hudson Review, Paris Review, Southern Review, ZYZZYVA and other journals. Born and raised in Charleston, South Carolina, she has lived for more than two decades in the San Francisco Bay area.
REVIEWS
“Where Bishop’s art tended to be on the threshold between the visual and the visionary, Anderson’s swerve from her great precursor adheres to the visual, and yet teases from it what can be seen as an intimation at once immanent and transcendental.”—Harold Bloom
“Doubtful Harbor charts an intrepid journey to regions as remote as Shanghai, Fiesole, the Peloponnese, an orchard in Macedonia, a silk factory in Suzhou … Watched over by the guardian spirits of Elizabeth Bishop and Virginia Woolf, Anderson writes with the passion and uncanny precision of a poet in full possession of her powers. Doubtful Harbor is a uniquely accomplished book by a uniquely talented poet. A wonderful achievement.”—Sherod Santos
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
Woman in Kuala Lumpur
One
Painting the Bathroom
Swan-Boat Ride
Shucks
Red Oaks
Three Birds in One Cypress
Sleeping and Waking
Starfish at Pescadero
The Whale
Glaciers
Perhaps
Two
Doubtful Sound
On the Way to Keats’ House
Colossus
Fireworks
The Magpie
April in Paris
Boats
Horse at Murano
Birthday Sonnets
Suzhou
Pigs in the River
Photographs, East and West
Three
Landscape with Groundhog
Orca Cannery
Fleming Spit
Rockport
Cape Dunes
Flags
Singing Line
Alpine Lake
Prairie Installation
Rim
Four
Colman’s Well
Red Sails
Woman Fishing
Lady Fishing
White Garden, Kent
Grasmere
Fresco
Rome Again
In the Room the Women Come and Go
Light of Troy
Asphodel
Tainaron
Notes
Acknowledgments
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC