Endorsements

It's rare, especially now, to encounter poems so well-made, so rich in traditional learning and painterly exactitude, that speak to the heart as strongly as to the mind. This is a memorable debut.
—Alan Williamson

Encountering news photographs, paintings, and remembered private moments in many places, Idris Anderson's poems respond to love and grief, memories and catastrophes, beauty and suffering, by tracing visual compositions, real or imagined--blue water, green rocks, orange fire, gray smoke, yellow helmets, a white dress, mauve-pink firelight of bombed burning houses, purple figs, a black boot, and red mud, a red coat, the bright red blood of injury. In this book, insistent seeing can make damage uncomfortably appealing to our greedy eyes, and yet is also a tender homage to love and beauty.
—Reginald Gibbons

Idris Anderson's capacious imagination and intelligence come alive in what she calls "the fluctuating waters of myth and history" and illuminates each moment of her resplendent and poignant collection of poems, Mrs. Ramsay's Knee. The hope or drive of these poems--and their success--is to discover, as Virginia Woolf reminds us, "intimacy itself" and to lay claim to the knowledge that lies deep inside the landscape of our desires.
—Michael Collier