The Work of Hands, Catherine Anderson (Perugia Books, 2000)

I had wanted to enter
our country's strange & beautiful heart
with my rapid oars.

In her new book of poetry, The Work of Hands, Catherine Anderson succeeds in entering "our country's strange and beautiful heart," and in the process enlarges our hearts as well. This is a collection both personal and transpersonal, deeply empathetic but never sentimental. Memory, landscape, and history shape the work. As a former ESOL teacher, Anderson has been deeply affected by the life stories of immigrants and refugees: their losses and endurance, their memories, and their prevailing hope.

In the collection's introductory poem, "The Life of Wood," the poet brings us deep into the center of Cambodia to the largest religious temple in the world, Angkor Wat. The poem, which offers the image of a carved statue of a boy kneeling before Buddha, moves beyond exquisite description into a metaphor for the years of war and genocide Cambodians have had to endure:

Near the temple where the boy
has sat for three hundred years
sugar palms show the mark of bullets
in their green wood.

In subsequent poems, we are brought closer to home: A Cambodian refugee narrates resettlement experiences in the ironically titled "Wonderland," a Haitian man is forced to relive torture in his homeland in "How to Prepare the Haitian Applicant for Asylum." In "The Name of a Tree," an immigrant woman speaks:

it's better to forget what you used to know:
the taste of fish cooked in banana leaves...
the rose color of sea waves at dusk...

But one of the strengths of this collection is its refusal to allow us to forget, especially about the experiences of people margin-alized in our culture. In that sense, Anderson is a poet of witness, part of an admirable tradition that speaks the unspoken.

Originally a Midwesterner, the poet lingers on landscape in many of the poems. In "Before Touching Ground," she lyrically yet unsentimentally reflects:

Traveling west cased in white
     clouds going
home to what I was made from
dog brown earth & flattened
     pissed off hills....

The themes of family and childhood feature prominently in the book as well, often with the perspective-taking of someone older looking back at early experiences. A mother's anger, a girl's first experience with work, a brother's hospitalization provide the focus for a deeper understanding of the past. Some of the journeys home are literal: plane flights take her home and back again, while others appear as memories pulling the writer, and us, back to early recollections of girlhood.

Anderson tells us, in "Strange and Beautiful Heart":

A story is told over and over again
because it feels true on the tongue.

The poems in this collection, written with clarity and grace, should be read over and over again because they, too, feel "true on the tongue."

Lenore Balliro is the editor of Field Notes.

The Work of Hands is available through Perugia Press, PO Box 108, Shutesbury, MA 01072. perugia@mindspring.com