My Problem with the Truth by Chris Anderson
Praise for My Problem with the Truth:
"Chris Anderson's My Problem with the Truth is a book of largess and celebration.
Its poems rise out of a quality of attention-to feeling, thought, and,
above all, language-that both prompts and invites similar focus, similar
absorption, from readers. Anderson's book makes a world and point
of access: experience whole and new rises off the page."
Lex Runciman
"The poet's gift for metaphor and language is so remarkable that there
is no "problem with the truth" in the identities he sees all
around him.
Moreover, his self-portrait as a boy-or his persona-is attractive enough
to make the reader go along with anything he proposes."
Madeline DeFrees
"Chris Anderson's poems in My Problem with the Truth reveal the fruit of
long meditation on the things of this world, but a world rinsed, cleansed
of the scrim of our egos, made luminous, singing as on the first day of
creation. There's humor here, and a voice to be trusted. These are quiet
poems, hushed, unwilling to shout. But there's a power here, too, a sensibility
both deep and sane, convinced that, if we only tried, we too might actually
recover something like joy itself."
Paul Mariani
"The life Chris Anderson shares here is rich, and he lends his readers
his own skill in viewing it, in living it. He bends the revealing word
around his faith and doubts, around what he marvels at and what pains
him. Solitary thoughts in church, remembering being a boy, the immense
love a man feels for his children, the unlooked-for revelations delivered
by the sun through the forest's trees, or the stars coming suddenly into
view in the night-this and more are delivered in these pages."
Jeremy Driscoll
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Chris Anderson is professor of English at Oregon State University, where
he has taught since 1986, and author or coauthor of nine previous books,
including Edge Effects: Notes from an Oregon Forest (Iowa, 1993),
a finalist for the Oregon Book Award in creative nonfiction. In 2000,
he received the Excellence in Teaching Language Arts award from the Oregon
Council of Teachers of English for his "years of exemplary practice."
He is also an ordained Catholic Deacon and active in parish and campus
ministry, baptizing, marrying, burying, preaching, and leading retreats.
With his wife, Barb, the Pastoral Associate at St. Mary's parish in Corvallis,
he has three children: John, Maggie, and Tim. |
excerpts
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Enormous Roommates
(was “Gigantic Roomates”)
for Jack and Lorene
The room where we slept
jutted out above the waves,
the kelp beds lifting and falling
beneath our open window.
And as we awoke and stretched
and brushed our teeth, the gray whales
fed not a hundred yards away,
one, two, now three dark backs
arcing and sinking along the shore,
like three enormous roommates,
entirely polite, calmly observing
their morning routine.
The air tastes of coffee and brine.
Just above the rim of the cup
a great fluke slips
down the endless hall.
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The Letter C
Bedtime he takes me in his arms and out
into the cold, dark air of the mountain we live on,
halfway up in our cracker-box house
with the fence and the swings,
trees and darkness to the open top.
And shifting my weight against his shiny badge,
he points to the C on the top of the mountain,
the great Colville C all lit up with lights,
and to the tall, white cross glowing pale above it,
phosphorescent, as if hanging in the dark.
The letter C is shining on the mountain,
a fuzzy cross hangs high in the dark,
and I am floating in my father's arms,
I am hanging, too, the butt of his pistol
slick and hard beneath my slippered feet.
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