Anita Skeen

Anita Skeen is Director of the Creative Arts Festival and the Fall Writing Series at Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu, New Mexico. She is Professor of English and Director of the Residential Option in Arts ...

Resurrection of the Animals, The
Poems by Anita Skeen

Anita Skeen

This book was featured at the YOUNG FOLK BOOKFEST tent, August 8-9, at the MSU Museum's Great Lakes Folk Festival, in East Lansing, Michigan.

The Resurrection of the Animals explores the trinity of the natural world, the humans adrift in it, and the animals that accompany them. Although each of the five sections centers on a particular theme, motifs of change, loss, cycles, and transformation thread through the collection, weaving the parts into a unified whole. Individual sections focus on: the seasons of the year, and by extension, people’s lives; the power of memory and its limitations; the theory that what is magical often resides within; and, the mysteries of love. The Resurrection of the Animals culminates in the title section, revealing the lessons of kinship with animals and how epiphanies occur in the simplest actions— taking a walk with dogs or catching sight of a bird on the wing. These poems suggest that memory, association, and interaction with the tangible world can revive a part of the self that has slipped below the depths of consciousness.

“Much of Skeen’s new collection reminds us, achingly, beautifully, of what we can no longer take for granted. At this frightening time in our country’s history, it’s especially pleasurable and useful to turn to these quiet poems that celebrate the quotidian, that call our attention, with loving precision, to the details that illuminate our lives.”

—Susan Ludvigson

Reviews

"Whether you read Hughes, Lehman, or another poet. . .don't overlook Skeen's poems. They fulfill the promise of the art: a luminous vessel linking the rhythms of the cosmos to our particular place on earth. She, too, contains worlds."

- Arlice Davenport

travel editor, The Eagle