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Unflinching, elegiac, and sometimes fueled with invective, Violet Transparent examines loss in both the natural and human landscapes. Anne Coray does not shy away from political or environmental commentary, but she knows when to pull back and let the poem be a poem. This collection dares to follow in the footsteps of luminaries like W. S. Merwin and William Heyen, poets whose deep and compassionate regard for nature informs and makes imperative their work.
In "This Close to Permanence” Anne Coray looks into a lake and thinks, "Nothing I’ve made has such beauty of fusion.” Several poems later she asks, "Is it possible, then, to reconcile division?” This, then, is the struggle of this fine poet: by way of the poem, despite lament and anger over our accelerating natural and spiritual losses—to achieve a sustaining vision of language and place that might hold for her listeners, too. Nothing, of course, is certain—”Ask the great auk about guarantees”—but poem after poem here achieves an earned stay against despair, against resignation. I’ve read Violet Transparent with admiration and gratitude.
—Willliam Heyen
Violet Transparent is an exact, and exacting, map of the heart’s north country, where "the snow-graced peaks reflect/ what most of us come to know:/ the best we can have is the welcome/ of looking through.” Anne Coray knows such welcome, and in these poems she proves herself to be a fearless and inventive explorer of a land that most of us but glimpse in dream or from a great distance. Hers is "a furious faith/ in the righting of wrongs.” Violet Transparent helps us see the world aright.
—Christopher Merrill, Director
International Writing Program
University of Iowa
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