Spells

"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, as well as an evidently committed engagement with the work of other women writers visible in her translations from the work of Anna Akhmatova and the French Renaissance poet Louise Labé. Finch has comprehensively raided the myth kitty, re-examining female roles in classical myth or the Judeo-Christian myth of origins... In evidence throughout this volume is Finch's passionate involvement with the nuts and bolts of poetic craft, her abiding fascination with the variety of poetic form and metre. This forms a pleasingly intuitive harmony with the mythological interests detailed above. 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

""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, as well as an evidently committed engagement with the work of other women writers visible in her translations from the work of Anna Akhmatova and the French Renaissance poet Louise Labé. Finch has comprehensively raided the myth kitty, re-examining female roles in classical myth or the Judeo-Christian myth of origins In evidence throughout this volume is Finch's passionate involvement with the nuts and bolts of poetic craft, her abiding fascination with the variety of poetic form and metre. This forms a pleasingly intuitive harmony with the mythological interests detailed above. 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

""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

"An exuberant exposition of Annie Finch's accomplishment as a poet of craft, humor, myth, intimacy and of the natural world."

~Marilyn Hacker, chancellor, Academy of American Poets

"Whenever I get discouraged about some trends in contemporary poetry I think of Annie Finch, a shining light, and I feel better.""

~Carolyn Kizer

"Annie Finch is an American original, a master of control who shows no fear of excess, and none of quietness either. With a perfect-pitch ear for the American tongue, she is a formalist as much in the tradition of Robert Duncan and Bernadette Mayer as of Hart Crane and John Berryman. The directness and simplicity of her poems are deceptive –they have depths and delights that appear to go on forever. We haven't had a poet so capable of combining control and excess since the young Robert Duncan.""

~Ron Silliman

"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. . . . She is a major poet, one of very few who understand how lyric lives in part because it can speak for something larger than the ego.""

~Charles Altieri, University of California, Berkeley