“All of us are many selves within our lifetimes, one that is thrust upon us at birth, shaped during youth, and reconstructed throughout our lives. Who is this self? Who is this self in relation to others? In the coming-to-be of childhood or In the midst of illness, we face an unknown self within the one that is known. Even after death, we appear as fluid as water in the memories of those who knew us best. Strange Attractor reveals our multiple, shifting selves with power and tenderness, as if Simpson were showing us how to shed our skins.”

23 collections of Canadian poetry to watch for this fall

The human body is a world. How it contains all that it does, how it is altered, and how it is transformed after death are the concerns of Quick, a new collection of poetry from one of Canada’s most exciting poets.

From the shock of a near-fatal car accident to a meditation on the body as one world within other, larger worlds, the book becomes an anatomy in itself.

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In Loop, Anne Simpson explores the power, and the anguish, of many different modes of return – retrieval, revision, the covering of old ground with eyes wider and thoughts reconditioned by difficult wisdom. These poems occur at that place where a focused, compassionate vision comes to inhabit language and to find the forms that will suffice: a Möbius strip poem that loops back on itself; a crown of sonnets that take us back to the shock and grief of the twin towers and find deep resonance with paintings by Brueghel; a set of quick improvisations like the motion studies done for a drawing class.

Simpson’s work shows us, again and again, the insight and excitement that come from the practice of a necessary craft in the service of a committed vision.

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Amazon.CA – Loop by Anne Simpson

Sensuously attentive to the world, intensely imagined, and musically driven, Light Falls Through You is a book that remembers the victims – of war, of atrocity, of casual violence – and calls upon language to render homage. Whether she is bringing poetry elegiacally to the service of an individual, to the masses of Rwandan dead or the casualties of the Montreal massacre, Anne Simpson writes with meditative insight balanced by imaginative reach and an intense musicality. In “Usual Devices” she gives an account of the Trojan War in a sequence about punctuation marks, deftly and wittily revealing the entrenchment of epic violence in the ordinary traffic signs of syntax. And the book’s closing poem weaves an altarpiece appropriate to our time out of everyday elements, a homemade icon whose yearning toward coherence, toward closure and hope, is a brave, articulate music for the century’s end. From that place “where we came into it/with our disbelief,” Simpson’s poems point to the imaginative place where “we remember the miraculous.”

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