In Sepia

by Jon Anderson

A reissuing of In Sepia, poetry by Jon Anderson.

Genres: Poetry

48 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

Jon Anderson was an American poet. He published seven books of poetry, including Day Moon (2001), The Milky Way: Poems 1967–1982 (1983), Death & Friends (1970), which was nominated for the National Book Award, and Looking for Jonathan (1968).

He was the recipient of a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, two awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award.

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

This volume is fascinating upon re-reading. Maybe much better than the 24 year-old's reading, but by my own retrospect, a not-quite classic. It's the volume in which Jon Anderson taught himself to not write. As David Smith explains on the back-cover of the volume I originally read, Milky Way, which was a collected poems that appeared (thru Ecco) in 1983, so includes In Sepia, Anderson impressed himself so on the poetry reading literary public on the basis of his first three books published by Pitt Poetry Series, that by the time -- 1974 -- In Sepia appeared, Anderson was a star, a youthful Iowa hire five years after his MFA, and by Smith's lights, a pole star for a whole generation of poets coming through the Sixties. ("Read 'The Secret of Poetry'" was one of the first instructions I received from James Galvin.)

Reading the volume's first section, you understand why. First "John Clare," an aubade invoking the Romantic poet that endeavors to occupy his radical innocence; then "Rosebud," Anderson's stunning road poem about stopping with his wife (the poet Barbara Anderson) on an Oglala reservation gas station, encountering there the Sioux as not quite as other as they might have hoped; and next, "The Commitment," which opens the propitious longing to have been done with one's writing in seeing its loss in his friend (the poet Steve Orlen). Another autopsy on Clare (a kind of footnote to the earlier poem); a set of mistranslations from the Chinese classical tradition (Charles Wright's whole career seems to start here); and closing the section, "In Autumn," in which, almost irrationally, you feel the whole oracular burden of his having written such poems: "there was a kind of exultation | that wanted to go on," as Anderson declares, and a little too reasonably (for who asked for reason?) "I understand by the body's knowledge | I will not begin again."

He did; in fact, he wrote a whole "new poems" section for The Milky Way, but the remaining poems of In Sepia keep reminding you of that bare, oracular voice he was pointing the first section toward. Which strikes one in the experience of it as unsustainable. By the final section, the whole book seems to have become about recusancy. Easy to surmise now, sure, but Anderson waited 20 years after Milky Way to publish another book. It was his last.

[hh · Rating 4 out of 5]

plain lovely