Second Bloom: Poems: 23 (Poiema Poetry)

In Second Bloom Silver looks unflinchingly and honestly at the suffering of cancer while at the same time celebrating the possibility of joy the persistence of beauty and love the simultaneous winnowing and comfort of faith. These poems are contemplative and often personal but reach out to the world as a whole: from IV poles to hula hoops from riding a roller coaster with ones son to comforting a dying friend at Christmas. The poems glean their subject matter from ordinary life from art from the natural world. Silvers poetry attempts to preserve the worlds luminous moments and to hold grace and despair simultaneously in the human heart. At the heart of these new poems is a longstanding determination to make the most of time and of mind and of the immediate surround--whether that immediacy is comprised of grief or of joy or of perplexity. The deep bass note here is attend! The developing hunger is holiness. --Scott Cairns author of Slow Pilgrim: The Collected Poems To bloom is so foolish / that it must be wisdom Anya Silver writes in poem after stunning poem about living with cancer and still finding words to praise this beautiful and ephemeral world. These are the bravest poems youll ever read by a woman at the top of her artistic game. Even though she knows that winter is coming Silvers words put out fresh green shoots. These poems will crack open your heart. --Barbara Crooker author of Les Fauves and Barbara Crooker: Selected Poems In lines saturated with colors and delicious with sneaky rhymes in elegies and ekphrastic poems in liturgical poems and hymns to ordinary things in ordinary time--a slinky green dress a sons light-brown hair a grape popsicle on the tongue after days of hospital fasting--Silver gives us lifes pain met time and again with pleasure and feast rather than with despair. Although the roses in second bloom / know whats coming they bloom nonetheless. To read this book is to witness Silver seeking and finding holiness around every corner. --Melissa Range author of Scriptorium and Horse and Rider Underneath the bees and birds and blossoms of this fine collection Anya Krugovoy Silver reveals the stings and flights of joy--the transience of this our life and the tender hope of a life to come. Her eye and ear find beauty in the darkest places. To read her is to know firsthand the meaning of the word redemption. --Paul J. Willis author of Say This Prayer into the Past Second Bloom is Anya Silvers fourth book of poetry. Her previous books are The Ninety-Third Name of God I Watched You Disappear (2010) for which she won the Georgia Poet of the Year Award and From Nothing (2016). She is Professor of English at Mercer University and lives in downtown Macon Georgia with her husband and son. She is a poet teacher wife mother and metastatic breast cancer thriver.