Praise for Anya Krugovoy Silver
“Silver’s lyric voice and stunning, insightful metaphors illuminate the ordinary, the challenging, and the sublime.”—Image
“[Silver’s] poems know suffering and rail against God, they know mourning and the death of a friend, they celebrate and lament. God is a brooding presence throughout a collection that is full of both the knowledge of the cross and the joy of the reality beyond it.”—Christian Century
“Deeply affecting . . . [Silver] confronts the problem of pain in poems that move from hungry intimacies with the physical world to high reckonings with the Almighty.”—Anglican Theological Review
“Silver takes the breadth of her life experience—the raw suffering of her cancer diagnosis and treatment, her turn to religion, her fears about death, her gratitude for her life—and transforms it into thoughtful, intelligent poems.”—ArtsATL
Passionately written and perfectly crafted, Anya Krugovoy Silver’s poems help us to view life through a different lens. In I Watched You Disappear, she offers meditations on sickness but also celebrations of art, motherhood, and family, as well as a sequence of poems based on the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm.
Throughout her collection, Silver examines feelings of pain, anger, and urgency caused by a serious illness and presents the struggle to cope in a lyrical and moving way. Never overwhelmed by her own mortality, Silver manages to speak with beauty and grace about a terrifying subject.
In her poems based on Grimm’s fairy tales, Silver subtly and surprisingly interweaves retellings of these tales with reflections on life and death:
“Strawberries in Snow”
Belief comes easily to the ill.
Miracles fall from their lips like gems,
are worn like secret amulets. A woman,
I’m told, brushed her steps of snow
and found the very thing she craved,
strawberries fresh as early summer,
dimpled sweet and red beneath the rime.
Pink climbed back to her ailing cheeks,
the way new blood makes the body sing.
And yet, no one talks of her sister,
who also searched, found nothing there.
She swept and swept until she fell.
I’ve been so good, she wept, the wind
remorseless over earth that wouldn’t bear.
Infinitely touching, engaging, and finely tuned, Silver’s poems invite us to look at the lives we love in new and profound ways.
