Second Bloom

In Second Bloom, Silver looks unflinchingly and honestly at the suffering of cancer, while at the same time celebrating the possibility of joy, the persistence of beauty and love, the simultaneous winnowing and comfort of faith. These poems are contemplative and often personal, but reach out to the world as a whole: from IV poles to hula hoops, from riding a roller coaster with one's son to comforting a dying friend at Christmas. The poems glean their subject matter from ordinary life, from art, from the natural world. Silver's poetry attempts to preserve the world's luminous moments and to hold grace and despair simultaneously in the human heart.


""At the heart of these new poems is a longstanding determination to make the most of time, and of mind, and of the immediate surround--whether that immediacy is comprised of grief, or of joy, or of perplexity. The deep, bass note here isattend!The developing hunger isholiness.""
--Scott Cairns, author ofSlow Pilgrim: The Collected Poems

""'To bloom is so foolish / that it must be wisdom,' Anya Silver writes, in poem after stunning poem about living with cancer and still finding words to praise this beautiful and ephemeral world. These are the bravest poems you'll ever read, by a woman at the top of her artistic game. Even though she knows that winter is coming, Silver's words put out fresh green shoots. These poems will crack open your heart.""
--Barbara Crooker, author of Les Fauves and Barbara Crooker: Selected Poems

""In lines saturated with colors and delicious with sneaky rhymes, in elegies and ekphrastic poems, in liturgical poems and hymns to ordinary things in ordinary time--a slinky green dress, a son's light-brown hair, a grape popsicle on the tongue after days of hospital fasting--Silver gives us life's pain met time and again with pleasure and feast, rather than with despair. Although 'the roses in second bloom / know what's coming,' they bloom nonetheless. To read this book is to witness Silver seeking, and finding, holiness around every corner.""
--Melissa Range, author of Scriptorium and Horse and Rider

""Underneath the bees and birds and blossoms of this fine collection, Anya Krugovoy Silver reveals the stings and flights of joy--the transience of this our life and the tender hope of a life to come. Her eye and ear find beauty in the darkest places.To read her is to know firsthand the meaning of the wordredemption.""
--Paul J. Willis, author ofSay This Prayer into the Past


Second Bloom is Anya Silver's fourth book of poetry. Her previous books are The Ninety-Third Name of God, I Watched You Disappear (2010), for which she won the Georgia Poet of the Year Award, and From Nothing (2016). She is Professor of English at Mercer University, and lives in downtown Macon, Georgia, with her husband and son. She is a poet, teacher, wife, mother, and metastatic breast cancer thriver.