Anchoress: A Poem

by Esta Spalding

Awake before dawn a year after his lover Helen's death, Peter H. begins to assemble his memories of her. How to conjure the dead? How to put a lover's body together again?

Working through the winter, spring, and into the late summer in a basement laboratory at the Vancouver Aquarium, Peter scrawls into his notebook pieces of her story, and of their story together. Slowly, he begins to see the secret tunnels between Helen's death and the death of her parents, between her loyalty to her sister, France, and her passion for right action.

A sensual, haunting book-length poem, Anchoress moves gracefully from the painted caves of Vichy France, where Helen's mother is born, to the banks of the Seine where her parents meet; from a foster home in Illinois to the grey stone university buildings where Helen becomes obsessed with the televised events of the Gulf War.

This book will challenge the way we think about the boundaries between politics and passions, love and war.

Genres: Poetry

128 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1997

Reviews

[Jordan Phizacklea-Cullen]

Topical yet ethereal (if that's possible), a sensual meditation on love, family and loss.