Damrosch’s new collection of poetry, Post & Line, brims with connection and community, both with humans (bank tellers, grocery baggers, neighbors, family) and through visitations with all sorts of creatures (owls, kiskadees, Carolina wrens, goldfinches, to name a few). Words themselves also come within the scope of her acute attention. “The words need us,” she writes, “…to form them again in our clumsy mouths,/swaddling them with our thick tongues.” At one point, Damrosch seeks to discover with these words, “how to let go of being me.” This becomes less about personal extinction and more about a dispersal of self, an inclusion or embrasure of the rest of the world and all its unique denizens, both human and otherwise. Throughout these quiet and wise moments of observation and carefully crafted, tightly wrought lines, what a treasure to witness Damrosch engage in page after page of “this risky thing/ of assembling something beautiful.”
~ Stephen Cramer, winner of the National Poetry Series & the Louise Bogan Award.
“What is the word for a nameless body?” asks Anne Damrosch in her stunning poem “Questions About The Future Use Of The Name Englesby Brook In The Absence Of The Brook Itself.” Questions reverberate throughout her impressive collection Post & Line. Damrosch wisely follows Basho’s advice to “simply observe;” she has learned well from that haiku master. She gives us not a straight answer, but a transformative zing. And she offers us a visit into her own zingy spirit, her generosity and compassion, her wit, her loves and concerns, her ear for story and sound.
~ Sue D. Burton, author of BOX, winner of Two Sylvias Press Poetry Prize.
The poems in Anne Damrosch’s new collection, Post & Line, seem timeless. Here is a poet who delights in the “ordinary miracle” of plants and gardens, the vacant nest of a phoebe that is “a tidy cup/lined with moss and milkweed silk.” Yet here, too, are the bared teeth of an angry groundhog, the specter of government detention of migrants, the ugly word written in snow on a parked car, and the myriad ways humans fail at perfection. These poems remind us it is possible to view such contradictions with compassion and sometimes irony, to accept that “the things of the world will continue” after we no longer exist, and that ultimately “Flame touches wick,/everything shimmers/in this altered light.”
~ Angela Patten, author of Feeding the Wild Rabbit & In Praise of Usefulness.
Anne Damrosch’s poems open the world for us, generously and precisely. They’re full of acorns, owls, dogs, flowers, mosquitos, bats, and people; they take us all over the world, to Haiti, Mexico, New York City, Marseille, yet stay vividly local, often anchored in her own neighborhood in Vermont. And there’s beautiful prose in Post & Line, haibun and short pieces as flexible and graceful as dancers, as astute and dry as koans. Her preoccupation with the mind and what the senses can’t know also threads through the book. In a poem about a neighbor’s garden, she sets up the paradox early: “This garden is made for the eyes.” Though easy to stay there, instead she ends it this way: “Inside the sweet limits of a picket fence/cloaked in morning glories, this afternoon/ the closing flowers give a last glimpse/of the most honest blue/ beyond the sky.”
~ Anna Blackmer, author of Hexagrams.
