There is something of the 21st century Psalmist’s voice in Anya Krugovoy Silver’s poems, something eternal and echoing. As a Brain Scan lens searches her brain for tumors, the poet writes: “I imagine God’s eye scanning my soul.” But this isn’t abstract devotional poetry, reader. There is heart-breaking honesty here, first and foremost: “Why do my fingers pass over my nape / and pull away first strands” of hair, Krugovoy Silver asks, “why is my head mimicking autumn / by shedding itself all over the rugs?”
Yes, this is the land of cancer, and Anya Krugovoy Silver is both our honest interlocutor and our unrelenting singer. She is our bard, our guide through these circles of being and fire.
As I turn the pages, I am astounded by the uncommon purity of despair in these poems. I am astounded, too, by how the ineffable is always present here—however absent it might, at moments, seem—“How easy / to pray to something strange,” she says.
“I love hyacinth,” she says. “I offer my living warmth.” she says. “You and I are earth,” she says. “Hold me, all you saints and angels,” she says. “Don’t let life / like a child struggling in my arms, climb out of my body.”
I keep quoting the line after line because they break my heart. There is no other way to say this: Anya Krugovoy Silver’s poetry breaks my heart.
But, there is more: there is a sense of presence, a sense of one human voice becoming so naked that it is larger than simply one human’s voice: “You are Anya, you have cancer, you are married,” the poet tells herself—as we watch and realize that we are in a presence of a full spirit—“My name, my health, my love. The knowledge I will forget this forever. / Soon I will forget all this forever. / Going even more deeply into dreams: / where to, I can’t say—but far, far.”
This book is beautiful poetry, yes. It is also an inimitable document of a human soul’s passage—an incredible, incurable, unrelenting book of hours.
~Ilya Kaminsky
Searing and tender, ferocious and delicate, the meticulously crafted lyrics of Anya Silver’s Saint Agnostica speak with utter conviction from the outer edges of mortality. In this courageous, relentlessly candid volume, finished just before her death, Silver depicts the challenges of living with stage four breast cancer with her characteristic emotional sensitivity and probing intellect. As always she grapples with her illness through the lens of her faith, a faith that dares to embrace anger and doubt along with gratitude and praise. Silver employs considerable formal ingenuity, a finely tuned ear and inventive wordplay to express the breadth of her devotions—to family, to the mountains and the ocean, to poetry and music and visual art, and to her sisters in the metastatic community. From start to finish Saint Agnostica shimmers with longing and mystery, each poem a prayerful testament to the fragile beauty of life, a reckoning with its inevitable end.
~Edward Hirsch
