Calendars
SHORTLISTED, FOREWORD POETRY BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD
Annie Finch's memorable voice pulses through Calendars, singing the cycles of time that unite our lives with nature and each other.
The poems in Calendars celebrate word, body, and the earth—whether in a a series of ritual seasonal chants, a hauntingly fragmented meditation on Persephone, a classically wrought epithalamium, the long elegy for Finch's father, or a sequence of ecstatic lyrics on childbirth. This musical and magical book lluminates the sacred in the mundane, and gives voice to the earth-centered spirituality of our era.
Calendars occupies a unique place among books of contemporary poetry. The stanzas of Calendars will echo in the reader's ear long after the book is closed.
Calendars is also available as a CD, recorded by the author
REVIEWS
There are some books one feels should be described as if they were wines, with that same loving attention to their physical qualities, to body and fullness and finish. Calendars is such a book. These are vintage poems. . ."
—Wendy Taylor Carlisle
An oracle, an ecstatic maenad: that is the kind of traditional poet Annie Finch is. . .Calendars is a book that rewards rereading, for Finch’s beauties reveal themselves slowly. . . The book’s deeper beauties await that second and third and fourth visit. This is a book that will last."
—Patricia Monaghan
In her third full-length collection, Finch focuses on the cyclical and seasonal, centering on themes of birth, death, family and artistic lineage, sexuality and female spirituality. . . Finch almost always draws one in with an unnerving and utterly unexpected phrase or image, as when addressing "The Moon": "Then you are the dense everywhere that moves,/ the dark matter they haven't yet walked through?"
—Publishers Weekly
" . . . She gets it. Her commitment is to the language . . ."
—Ron Silliman
“Annie Finch is a great love poet. Calendars is the work of a major poet, one of very few who understand how lyric lives in part because it can speak for something larger than the ego. Annie Finch understands better than any contemporary I know what poetry feels like and sounds like when it is completely at home in its traditions.”
"Sympathies, passions--so often the opposite of actions—are so intensely held, wrung and used, that Annie Finch's poems spread themselves like so much fresh laundry: sweet, abstergent, redressed."
—Richard Howard