cover image Cold Comfort

Cold Comfort

Maggie Anderson. University of Pittsburgh Press, $0 (67pp) ISBN 978-0-8229-3542-1

In a series of poems about several Walker Evans photographs, including one of the West Virginia graveyard in which Anderson's grandparents are buried, the poet writes: ""I see/ how beautiful this is even though everyone was poor/ but in Rowlesburg nothing's changed.'' The immutability of that corner of small-town America, where landscape and climate dictate the conditions of life, is Anderson's subject and the substance of her vision. There is a warm sepia tone to her poetry: this is country where the raucous vibrancy of modernity is not admitted. A somewhat monotonous sequence of poems about the dreams of vegetables also suggests torpor. Generally, these poems concentrate on the value of simple thingscountry wisdom, the comfort of home, the pleasing surfaces of rural scenes and seasons. (October)