Review of Len Anderson's first poetry book
Affection for the Unknowable
Praise by Joseph Stroud
Praise by Calder Lowe
Our Review
About Len Anderson
Book Praised by Joseph Stroud, author of Below Cold Mountain
"Len Anderson's Affection for the Unknowable
might have included a subtitle: News from the Universe,
for the poems in this book explore not only the personal world of the poet,
but also the world of Quantum Theory and Heisenberg's Uncertainty,
the world of physics and philosophy, ghazals of dark matter and the duende of Flamenco,
the spectral lines of hydrogen and our kinship with a redwood tree.
Len Anderson's poems manage this universe with clarity, candor, wit, compassion, and intelligence.
This is a book of wonder and marvels.
Len Anderson is a poet whose work bridges the Twentieth Century and the New Millennium."
Book Praised by Calder Lowe, Executive Editor of The Montserrat Review
"Affection for the Unknowable draws particular strength from its reverential exploration
of a life alternately informed by a somber and trenchant perspective and an infectious jouissance.
In reading this collection, there were extraordinary moments when I felt simultaneously humbled,
awed and terrified, yet ultimately restored by the wisdom and vibrancy inherent in Anderson's world-view.
His poetic voice is always a breath, a heartbeat, or a self-deprecating stumble away from the numinous.
His book is an astonishing gift to us all."
Our Review
Len Anderson's Affection for the Unknowable tells of much that he knows, such as in
Night Ghazal, which begins:
My love and I and the golden poppies sleep beneath the wing of the night
and this deep field of stars is also covered by the night.
I catch sight of her beauty and she asks, So who do you love?
Only you, I answer, only day, only night.
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At the same time he is indeed
writing of what is unknowable, the darkness behind the light and the light behind the darkness.
In many of his poems Len Anderson uses
the Ghazal verse form.
It is especially in those that he mingles his physicality and attention to the physical world
with his spiritual reaching toward what we cannot know - what is beyond life in space and time.
His training as a physicist and his career with machinery ground him, as does his childhood in
an apricot orchard. Some of the most startling of his narrative poems
are about his work with machinery and its operators in the paper mills where he once worked.
Len Anderson, then, establishes his poems on solid ground. and from there he
bears you with strong wings up into his poems. He lifts you with humor and with sincerity into mystery, as in
The Way Through, which ends:
I told her I'd like to check out our thermochemistry.
Turned out she was oxygen, I was fuel, I went up, then down, in flames.
Friends, when you run into a burning house to save a child,
the only way through the fire is to become flame.
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This is a very fine book and we urge our readers to
obtain their own copy.
How to Ordering your copy
You can buy
Affection for the Unknowable (ISBN 0-9716373-5-0, 104 pages, $12.00, Hummingbird Press) as follows:
- Ask your local book store to order this book of glorious poems.
Available in stores October 20, 2003.
- Order directly by
e-mail to Hummingbird Press.
About Len Anderson
Len Anderson was born and raised on the San Francisco Peninsula and received his BA and PhD in physics
from the University of California, Berkeley. As a physicist he worked in experimental elementary particle physics
at Berkeley and in Europe; in private industry he developed sensors for the automation of paper manufacturing.
He is a winner of the Dragonfly Press Poetry Competition and the Mary Lonnberg Smith Poetry Award.
He and his wife live in Santa Cruz County, California. He is a co-founder of Poetry Santa Cruz.
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