Fig Tree in Winter  by Anne Graue (WEBSITE, TWITTER)

Her Grace’s rating:  5 out of 5 stars

Genre: poetry

I read it as a: paperback chapbook

Source: my own collection

Length: 36 pp

Published by: dancing girl press (2017)

As part of the 2019 Read Harder challenge, I chose this book to complete the task for ‘read a collection of poetry published since 2014.’ I am the first to confess that I rarely read poetry and I am often confounded by it. However, in the interests of full disclosure, Anne is a friend of mine so it felt natural to want to use her book to complete this task; friendship aside, though, I find her poems to be beautifully feminine and strong as well as challenging. 

Anne was the person who taught me what found poetry is. I was delighted to learn this, because it was something I had done for ages and ages, from childhood, and just didn’t know there was a real name for it. I find it to be a really stunning form of art and would like to learn more about it, maybe even try some of my own, just for a new thing to hang on my library wall if nothing else.

I don’t really know how to review poetry. I think that this collection, though, has a strong theme of feminism and lost innocence to it. Many of the poems evoke feelings of nostalgia for our younger selves, for wishing we had known then what we know now, and more than a little disappointment and heartbreak at the way things turn out in the end. My favorite poems in the collection are ‘A World Divided’, ‘the asylum’, and ‘The Cure for Thinking’. These, to me, sum up so much of a woman’s experience that it is a little shocking to find in such a few brief lines.