Cold Comfort

Cold Comfort is a book of poems written out of deep affection and concern for the world in a dangerous time. An urbane stylist, Anderson characteristically focuses on rural and small-town America, where the events of personal history intersect those of the larger world.

"I like Maggie Anderson's strong sense of place and the unsentimental attention she pays to her West Virginia origins. These are rooted poems. Even the vegetables' dreams rely on a vivid internal logic. As 'corn . . . the enormous yellow dirigible of August . . . dreams fair weather' and 'dill . . . drifts seeds onto cucumbers it schemes to marry, ' I am beguiled."--Maxine Kumin, "Maggie Anderson celebrates the quotidian in her subtly eloquent poems. She write movingly of lives whose privacy and dignity she defends against the self-consciousness of art and the falsification of history. In these close-to-he-earth poems weather becomes density. Hers is a generous vision."--Lisel Mueller, "She is primarily a poet of moral urgency--a political poet as we say these days--but she is never shrill, relying on the tensions inherent in the natural world rather than rhetoric."--American Book Review, "The beautiful and scruffy where Maggie Anderson grew up should thank her for her fidelity to it, for she's made from that devotion a model of love useful there or anywhere. She's intellectually alert to the lures of comforts and wisdom and emotionally honest enough to want them all the same; she 'holds to her task / in the face of speculation, ' as she writes of a grandmother photographed with her arms full of wash. She's funny ('Only responsible people keep cows') and deadly serious. She's one of the ways our poetry has chosen to remind us who we are, and how much choice we had in that, and how little."--William Matthews, "The crux of Maggie Anderson's poems is the strong narrative line, one accompanied by an abundance of lore based in the folkways of the people. And her energy is that very essence of the old stories and poetry--present in the talk of ordinary people."--Shelby Stephenson

Maggie Anderson is the author of three previous collections of poetry, Years That Answer, Cold Comfort, and A Space Filled with Moving, editor of Hill Daughter: New and Selected Poems of Louise McNeill, and co-editor of A Gathering of Poets, and Learning