Customer Reviews

Fish Drum Magazine Volume #15

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I like to sit quietly with these poems of Anne Valley Fox because they are sensitive, sensual, feminine, and rich with surprising and delightful imagery. Anne's poetry is a glimpse into her personal life, and as I read them, also into my own. I highly recommend this evocative little book.

This retrospective collection of poems is the work of a remarkably gifted writer who strings together words like precious gems. She adeptly observes and preserves the smallest details of everyday life, bearing true witness to her surroundings with an unfailing talent for finding the extraordinary in the most ordinary situations. I recommend this book highly.

Anne Valley Fox holds the loving sword of truth with a steady hand...Her artful heartful grace in observing herself and her world is rare in it's hidden power.I'd like to see more of these songs of the soul anytime...I particularly like the section entitled "After Seven Years"...fierce, sensual and colorful glimpses of the way it is.....

This is a book of riches. Meditative, eloquent, and wise, Anne Valley-Fox's poems rise gently to the surface of consciousness and reach outward with the grace of ripples on a still pond. Both sensual and spiritual, they know of joy and grief, of loss and redemption, of the mystery that hovers always beyond our grasp. With unforced artistry and an appealing clarity of style they present a moving tableau of the transitory fragments that make up a life; they are poems to fill the day with new awareness.

In baseball, a pitcher is said to be "sneaky fast" when his deliveries, although appearing relaxed, and even slow, arrive at home plate so quickly that the astonished batter is rendered defenseless, overwhelmed by their suddeness. By the same token, the writer of this wonderful collection of poems should be called "sneaky profound." Her approach eschews all pretension, refusing to indulge in verbal pyrotechnics or high-flown mannerisms, so that her language, albeit rich and broadly drawn, becomes practically transparent, never intrusive, leaving the reader overwhelmed by the suddeness and depths of her insights into the human dilemma.

These are the stories of a seeker of wisdom who has chosen to search not in the esoteric, or the recherché, but in the places most accessible to her sensibilities, the places of the heart--lovers, husbands, children, friends, work, and play--and to bring forth from those places a vision pregnant with meanings. From the ordinariness of chopping wood and carrying water she has fashioned a bridge to the numinous.