Dear All,

Maggie Anderson’s wonderful poetry book, Dear All, (published in 2017 by Four Way Books) is a book to which I often return when I want to find a bit of solace. In particular, I love her opening poem “Dear All,” which feels as though it was written for me and to me. “You whose memory comes to me winter afternoons as the soon gone sun falls low and thin” is how Maggie begins—how this poem begins—how this book begins.

Somehow that line simultaneously fills me with sadness as well as with hope. I hold many memories of people I loved who have passed out of my life—friends, a husband, parents, one of my sisters—with the empty spaces left when they left (death…suicide…a drifting away from common interests) very much a part of who I am.

Maggie addresses the emptiness, but she also concludes this poem on a note that I find to be triumphant: “You must not wonder if I think of you still--/I have remained steadfast here/I have remembered you whole into this day.”

J.R.R. Tolkien said in Fellowship of the Rings that “memory is not what the heart desires,” and that thought certainly is true. But, sometimes, memory is all that remains.