Quiver

by Nathalie Anderson, Ann Aspell (Editor), Perky Edgerton (Illustrator)

Nathalie Anderson's third
and most thematically wide-ranging collection of poetry, published by Penstroke Press in Rochester, Vermont. Available through Schenkman Books.

94 pages, Paperback

Published May 31, 2011

Reviews

[Tristan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another wonderful read. I didn't like this quite as much as Crawlers, but it was fabulous all the same. In Quiver, Anderson takes on a whole range of different themes , so it is not necessarily as cohesive as Crawlers or Following Fred Astaire, but it fits together well enough and the range of themes makes for an excitingly varied read. She takes on growing up in the South--also dealt with in Crawlers--and questions of gender--like Following Fred Astaire, but she also deals with themes of love and lust, identity and the power of names (the poems "Lonesome Tonight?" and "Her Real Real Name" are particularly good examples of this), the way we think about position, communication, and more.
Every poem sings with the same music evident in her previous two collections. Here is a bit from "Opening":

It happens not only in mythical place--
in Vrinsavan, say, its burnt hills split
by the river's jagged edge, midnight coming on
and everything waiting--water's corrugations,
steel gray on cinder gray, lying in wait, and the
blown grove of coral and acacia trees just opening.

The themes are dealt with deftly, woven into elegant and smooth poems so easily that they almost disappear and are louder for it. Like in "Her Real Real Name" Part 1 "Stranger than Fiction":

What the-- What the dickens--! You can't do that no more
(I told that would-be novelist) Can't call your villain
"Mr. Sludge," can't call you're hero "Mr. Wright." And as for "Iva
Goodbody" -- ! That's where he shut me off. It's her real
real name, he said.
No use crying it's no excuse,
the way fact flirts--in fact--with fiction, shamelessly
winking her bold eye. So what if each morning I
get my news--really--from the radio's even-
tempered Joanne Slowburner, my weather--really--
from the equivocal Mary Cantell?

This poem reaches into the nature of names, of speech, of the way we change ourselves and our names to match, all done with a fluid and lightly humorous touch that makes it easy to read the poem while processing what Anderson is saying. Well worth finding a copy of this collection and reading it.