From Nothing: Poems by Anya Krugovoy Silver (review)

From Nothing is a collection of poems by Anya Krugovoy Silver, inspired by the poet’s battle with cancer. The poems reflect a spiritual approach to suffering, acceptance and denial. The poems are arranged in three sections: I Youth and Innocence, II Suffering, III Acceptance.

I judge a book of poetry by the inspiration it offers while reading it. If reading poetry causes me to dig deep into my own marrow and roots of words, then I know the book is speaking to me; we have launched a dialogue that will last through every page. Some pages will be delicious, and I will lick the spoon of invisible rhymes. Some pages will be void of flavor except for a few spicy thoughts. But in the end, I will have to thank the book for waking up my sleeping thoughts.

This is the experience I had while reading Anya Silver’s collection of poems, From Nothing. In this work, I witnessed the same nurturing that the poet received from John Donne, Kelly Cherry, Emily Dickinson, Rumi, and Virgil, to name a few. The poet has consumed colors and forms from Marc Chagall, Gustav Klimt, Toulouse-Lautrec and Emil Nolde. Throughout the book I smell the perfume of revelation that gave life and sustenance to the words that Silver knitted from her own loom of pain. This collection was fertilized by the muse of past artists; it feeds the mind with a juxtaposition of words that create a personal garden.

The cover is an interpretation of the poem “Raven”: “Tenderly as one cradles a bowl of water, he embraced me, and we rose upwards” (15). The visual image on the cover and the words add a unique depth to the collection that sparked my interest. In the collection, the poet struggles to deal with cancer by reworking the pain into words offered up to the healer God, as in the poem “Tenebrae (Holy Wednesday)” the poet evokes, “Pluck her soul from her paralyzed, tumor-choked body” (21). Here, as in many of the other poems, the poet has a desire to accept the pain of others as a way to acknowledge her own pain. “Rachel lifted her head and prayed/not for herself, but for her friend” (22). The poet reminds herself of the people she knows who are suffering, in the poem, “Just Red”: “My father is ailing in a nursing home,/my friend is dying in the hospital./What I want tonight is lipstick” (24). In this poem, we sense the need to escape into a world of normalcy, avoiding grief to do something mundane. But there is no way to avoid her own torment. In the poem “Poise,” the poet is forced to accept her reality; she writes:

I perform cancerDuring infusions, some patients lose their poiseAnd slump, steroidal, slack or napping.I will not let myself sleep in public.

(26)

The words are so powerful that as a reader I can see the ballerina dancing in the jewelry box. The images are fresh and sobering, they transport us into the difficult world of the hospital ward while the ballerina continues her dance.

In comparison to her other works, “From Nothing” is a continuation of Anya Krugovoy Silver’s inner discourse with herself in her battle with cancer. She dealt with the subject in her debut collection, The Ninety-Third Name of God: Poems (2010), and again in her second collection, I Watched You Disappear: Poems (2014). From Nothing, could be perceived as part three of a long dialogue on a subject that informs and defines her life’s work thus far. Each collection confirms her signature style of turning to art and the divine for comfort and meditation. She also uses fairy tales as a part of her dialogue on suffering and deliverance. “How lucky to be pretty enough for a glass coffin,/to die with a full face and cheeks like cherry blossoms...