Annie Finch
poet, writer, performer
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Calendars

Publisher: Tupelo Press
Publish Date: March 31, 2003
Pages: 70
Language: English
ISBN: 978-1932195002

If copies are not available from the publisher, contact Annie for your copy.

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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

 

From The Publisher

This musical and magical book illuminates 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.

Excerpt

LANDING UNDER WATER, I SEE ROOTS

All the things we hide in water
hoping we won’t see them go—
(forests growing under water
press against the ones we know)—

and they might have gone on growing
and they might now breathe above
everything I speak of sowing
(everything I try to love).

 

Awards

Foreword Poetry Book of the Year Award

Finalist, Yale Series of Younger Poets

Finalist, National Poetry Series

More Information

Calendars is also available as a CD recorded by Annie.

SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIALS

Download the free Readers Companion here, for behind-the-scenes insights and in-depth discussion of the poems, their themes, forms, and images, and scansions of their meters.

 

CALENDARS AS A TOOL FOR WRITERS

Because of Calendars’ wide formal virtuosity, it has been adopted by many poets as a template to practice different kinds of form. Poets interested in using the book in this way can download the free accompanying Calendars Readers Guide which includes scansions and commentary on all the forms in the book.

READ-ALOUD REMINDER FROM THE WEST END BOOK GROUP, PORTLAND, MAINE

“When we discussed Calendars in our book group, we discovered that we didn’t really begin to fully appreciate the poems until we read them aloud.“

Reviews

Annie Finch’s memorable voice pulses through the magical, earth-centered poems of 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 for the Wiccan Wheel of the Year, a hauntingly fragmented meditation on Persephone, a sensual wedding poem, an elegy for a powerful father, or a sequence of ecstatic lyrics on childbirth.

 

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

 

 

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.

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.

Charles Altieri

 

 

Finch is more shaman than formalist. She is keenly aware of the shape and sound of her poems. Whether in a chant, sonnet, ghazal, or even Billy Collins’ contrived paradelle, her skill is effortless: Form is merely the skin that allows her poems to breathe with ease.

Cindy Williams Gutiérrez, Calyx

 

 

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