Cold Comfort

Maggie Anderson is the author of three previous collections of poetry, Years That Answer, Cold Comfort, and A Space Filled with Moving, editor of Hill Daughter: New and Selected Poems of Louise McNeill, and co-editor of A Gathering of Poets, and Learning

I like Maggie Anderson's strong sense of place and the unsentimental attention she pays to her West Virginia origins. These are rooted poems. Even the vegetables' dreams rely on a vivid internal logic. As 'corn . . . the enormous yellow dirigible of August . . . dreams fair weather' and 'dill . . . drifts seeds onto cucumbers it schemes to marry,' I am beguiled.