Annie Finch’s Spells is a pure tone that calls us home to the first impulse of poetry. We link to mystery. We lift off.
Joy Harjo
Many contemporary poets use meter and rhyme, and write in traditional forms such as villanelles, but they often do so selectively, for sizzle, like Chinese spices in California cuisine. Annie Finch’s new book, Spells: New and Selected Poems, collects work by a poet who finds in the meters of English poetry a spiritual mantra, an invocation–linked to the old spells of witchcraft–of powers lying hidden beneath of the surface of the ordinary, a way of achieving personal integration. Spells selects poems from four earlier books by this scholar, translator, librettist, critic, and women’s activist––a leviathan who foregoes improvised originality and edgy presentation for a more ascetic, fully achieved meaning.”
Zara Raab
The reader can trust Spells, poem after poem, and can revel in it. . . . I enjoyed the reading experience thoroughly, knowing I could settle in. Together, the poems are fables and stories that echo into something greater, drawing the reader into a grand, female-centered narrative of ourselves and the world.
Anna Leahy, Fiction Writers Review
An amazingly gifted voice at the height of her talents. Spells will simply leave you enchanted.
David Bowles, The Monitor
Spells is an exuberant exposition of Annie Finch’s accomplishment as a poet of craft, humor, myth, intimacy and of the natural world.
Marilyn Hacker
Finch’s poetry, plays, and performance pieces, infused with the spirit of thousands of poetic predecessors, remind us that poetry and theater were once wedded and that, in poetry, emotional and intellectual meanings are inextricable from their material properties: voice, word, sound, form, and rhythm. Everyone should have a copy of Annie Finch’s Spells on their shelf, for those hours when patterned rhythm and sound seem the best approximation of the soul’s speaking.
Jeanetta Calhoun Mish, World Literature Today
One of the most dexterous formal poets writing in the United States today, Annie Finch is at ease in a dazzling variety of prosodic modes, from the very short lyric to the sonnet to myriad metrical constructions in stanzaic forms…all of her considerable talents are on display in Spells: New and Selected Poems.
Molly Peacock
Annie Finch has devoted her career to opening up the poetry world to a greater diversity of formal traditions, and Spells is a high-spirited and expansive selection of her finest work in many of these forms.
Debra Bruce, Fifth Wednesday
Finch’s ambition and optimism about that re-emerging matriarchal culture is everywhere evident in this collection; there is a strong sense of female identity in these poems . . . The rigours of metre, of patterned speech, connect, Finch seems to be implying, to something ancient in the human psyche; as she puts it, ‘patterned language that invites readers to experience words not just in the mind but in the body.’ Spells bears witness to a considerable body of work and an impressive commitment to the traditions of poetry across a poetic career that pans four decades.
Caitriona O’Reilly, Poetry Salzburg Review