A Shade Pulled Just Barely by Anne Bucey

 

Anne Bucey’s poems shimmer with the light and knowledge of a hard-won wisdom. Wrapped and pleated, worldly and domestic, this richly observed work helps to teach us “there’s nothing wrong with sadness.” Dear reader, there’s abundance to savor here: “every big white oak,” luminous yellow fruit, and so much singing. As the speaker says of a medical team in “Pink,” “Oh, what they do/ to make the pain / more bearable—” applies equally to these finely crafted poems, brimming with honesty and life.

–Leslie Williams, author of Matters for You Alone

 

Bursting with color and imagery, the poems in Anne Bucey‘s “A Shade Pulled Just Barely” offer an evocative glimpse of the shadow that lurks just behind the curtain we’re all drawn to peek through.

–Collin Kelley, “Wonder & Wreckage”

 

While reading Anne Bucey’s gorgeous poems, I kept thinking of Wordsworth’s belief “that poetry is the overflow of powerful feelings…recollected in tranquility.” These are redolent, impressive poems, full of lightening bugs that are “Kin/ less to lightening/ than fish/ in a dark aquarium—/aimless,/ drifting,/careless,/ it seems,/ that as the dark deepens,/ they rise.” A Shade Pulled Just Barely is a remarkable collection from a gifted poet tracing the long shadow of a life weighted with both serenity and sorrow.

–Kathleen Driskell, Kentucky Poet Laureate and author of The Vine Temple