Kirjahaku

Winner of the 2007 Lexi Rudnitsky Poetry Prize. This impressive debut is propelled by wanderlust, its music derived from the rumble of freight trains and the heave of ferries through literal and imaginative waterways. Whether set in Maine or in Arizona, in Ecuador or in Thailand, in waking or in dreaming, each poem resounds with the beauty and remoteness of its locality. Re-imaginings of travelogues by some notable explorers and naturalists, including Sir Walter Raleigh and Georg Eberhard Rumphius, underscore the collection's restless yearning for motion. Undertow marks the emergence of a distinctive new voice.

This collection is a mapping of the senses, in which rapture and disillusionment shadow each other, reflecting a world "where sun swirls on the rock-face by the spring/moving its blue and yellow hands/then vanishing." It is a book searching for truth beyond beauty by a poet who shines increasingly bright. Anne Shaw is also the author of Undertow (Persea 2007).