The poems in Anna Ross‘s Hawk Weather refresh our sensitivity to the beauty of the natural world in all its enormity and minuteness. Tirelessly attentive to its sensual particulars–as well as to their correspondence to each other and to human thought and feeling–Ross’s poems are exquisitely crafted, wise, patient, affirming, and full of care. As it is “impossible // to see a flying thing / and not think of a spirit rising,” so it is impossible, when reading this scrupulous, hard-won collection, not to be reminded of the wonder of there being a world to begin with–and of our responsibility to preserve it.
–Timothy Donnelly, author of Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit
Out of hardship and sweetness, writes Anna Ross, the vineyard brings forth an “ancient / earned fragility.” There is hardship in this book: the mortal, bruising facts of life and loss. There is also a delight in the senses, in the kinship with other creatures, and in the landscape one inhabits. This wonderfully crafted poetry thus arises out of a sharp-eyed, earned sense of the ephemeral in all things. Anna Ross helps us see and feel and remember that, as Wallace Stevens said, death is indeed the mother of beauty.
–Fred Marchant, author of Full Moon Boat
In Anna Ross‘ remarkable first collection, she gives us poems “…busy/ with unfurling…,” poems busily releasing their gorgeous, dense imagery and music. From ribcage to crocus tip, from jaw-line to ridge, vivid particular moves to vivid particular; rich lines swing one to the next to the next. Here, in poems singing with the transformation only metaphor can offer, we find the grief of miscarriage endured in a world where “…even the doormat/ has birthed feathery mushrooms.” Here, Anna Ross gives us her most moving gift: transcendence of loss and grief. “Out of hardship, sweetness, an ancient/ earned fragility.”
–Paulann Petersen, author of A Bride of Narrow Escape and Kindle
In Hawk Weather, her beautifully wrought debut collection, Anna Ross calls us into the mortal weather-world of fluxæ”the flash of bodies/ leaving a scene”æwith language and image fine-tuned to the world’s piercing beauties. She invites us to balance above the roaring that is the stream of grief, but also to float, in the lake of “True North,” suspended on the palm of the beloved. But there is more: “If only,” she says “If only” and we enter the passage of particular griefæmiscarried loss: “Little yolk, flyspeck, web / unworked, detail without name….” In striking image, in spare eloquence of language, Hawk Weather, opens deeper with each poem, culminating in the brilliant unrhymed crown of sonnets where owl and bitterroot, fence and fawn, weave a lament for the lost daughter. “out of hardship, sweetness,” says Ross, and in these eloquent poems, we are privileged to savor both.
–Judith Montgomery, author of Pulse and Constellation
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