From Booklist Anderson is quite different from two other, better-known Vietnam poets, Bruce Weigl and W. D. Ehrhart--more universal than the intimate Weigl, more populist than the radical Ehrhart. He hasn't published as much as his peers; this is only his second collection. If he needed time to hone these powerful, funny-horrific, brutal-tender poems, though, be glad he took it. Anderson has learned hard facts that he relays indelibly. The title poem is the monologue of a South African Special Branch member who is now fleeing the country confidently, for "A good torturer can always find a job." Anderson elsewhere depicts an "Oedipus Blind," who may be properly repentant but proudly recalls his rapture with Jocasta: "You cannot know what this was like. / The smell of her." A pair of Neruda-inspired poems conjures the partnership-conspiracy of "Coyote" and "Crows." Anderson's "Homage to Pound" is genuine but poses the impolite question: "Mad? How about guilty." This is all no-nonsense stuff. Ray Olson Read more Review "Anderson infuses his poetry with social consequences and a concern for those lives...touched by injustice or violence." -- MultiCultural Review "Anderson's poetry is passionate, humorous, original." -- Midwest Book Review"Simply magnificent. A miracle of language." -- Demetria Martínez Read more About the Author Doug Anderson has written two books of poems of which The Moon Reflected Fire won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and Blues for Unemployed Secret Police a grant from the Eric Matthieu King Fund of the Academy of American Poets. His play, Short Timers, was produced at New York's The Theater for The New City in 1981. He has written film scripts, fiction and criticism and is at present at work on a novel about human trafficking. He earned a Phd from the University of Connecticut and teaches at the Hartford campus. His awards include fellowships from the NEA, the Virginia Quarterly Review, Poets & Writers, Inc., The Massachusetts Artists Foundations, The MacDowell Colony and other funding organizations. His work has appeared in Poetry, The Massachusetts Review, The Connecticut Review, The Southern Review, Ploughshares and many other literary magazines. Read more
D**N
Babylon, Lizards and Kimono
Anderson's first book, The Moon Reflected Fire, won prizes, among them the prestigious Kate Tufts Discovery Prize. Such a strong first book leaves a poet plagued by the cynic's question,"sure, that book was good but can he do it again?" Blues for Unemployed Secret Police is Doug Anderson's answer and it is a resounding YES. This is one of those rare books in which stunning poem is followed by stunning poem, where we come to understand that the poet's earlier focus on Vietnam was an instance of a larger focus on the complex beauty and darkness which attend any real look at our deepest natures. Anderson compels our attention because he knows that the intensity of experience, whether pain or joy, which can be easily identified in extreme situations is also present when we find ourselves walking down a city street wondering why we are drawn to its noise and confusion (see Babylon) or when we are watching a "live petroglyph" "drawing the story of light larger in each twirled telling" (see Lizard). Anderson lives (uneasily) with his own beast, and with "the new evil" that "pours into the deep cup with the evil I have already seen" without forsaking what is good and nourishing in the world and among us (see Kimono, see Crow, see Coyote). Listen to this: "We don't come with souls, we make them up out of our ripening and our going to seed." How do you NOT read a poet who can write that?
J**S
Poignant and living
I discovered Doug Anderson's collection of poetry _Blues for Unemployed Secret Police_ when he was invited to teach a poetry workshop at my high school several years ago, of which I participated in. Doug talked to us about his poetry, his experiences in Vietnam, read some of his poems (from this collection) to us, and then helped us with our own poems by providing critiques. His manner, his poetry, and his humility--as well as his willingness to come to a high school and teach to a bunch of self-important high school students. Doug's poetry is riveting, it draws you in, and its beautiful in its humility. I recommend this collection to everyone.
P**S
Doug's Blues
Doug Anderson is a poet of rare authenticity. His work is layered, nuanced and resonant, capable of being forceful and tender, direct even as it alludes to the mystery of what we don't see beneath what we do. He delivers white hot emotion viewed through dispassionate eyes, and a connectedness that finds release only by going deeper into itself. Anderson writes political poems that ache with sad knot of love and love poems that crash through the senses like the assaults of war. His humor is wry and dry, but always there is the sense that it has been reached by way of tears, shed and unshed. I can't recommend his BLUES highly enough. Like the musical genre, it is a layered book, in which love and loss hold hands.
R**N
Real For Me
Look at anything in this book and you'll get caught. I read it all, then came back to "Itinerary."
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