Loop

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta. He is
the author of Calling Texas, Earth Prime, and Mind the Gap.

Anne Simpson’s poems combine formal elegance with deep moral insight.
She is particularly skilled at using the sonnet in an original way,
untainted by archaic language and attitudes. The crown of this book is
perhaps her sonnet sequence, “Seven Paintings by Brueghel,” which
uses familiar paintings like Hunters in the Snow to convey the horror of
the 9/11 attacks. The actual setting of the poems is the landfill on
Staten Island in which so much of the debris was dumped. The oblique
approach is more moving than an attempt to confront horror head-on. The
sequence is a corona, the newly revived Renaissance form in which the
last line of each sonnet becomes the first line of the next, and the
last line of the final sonnet is also the first line of the initial
poem.

Simpson also writes fine prose poems and a rather dazzling poem in the
form of a Mцebius strip, a paradoxical one-sided form that returns on
itself.

The collection is charged with aesthetic intensity and strong feeling.
It is even stronger than her brilliant debut, the award-winning Light
Falls Through You (2000).