This is What Life Does

These poems by Anne Randolph exude a joyful gratitude for the earth and for every good thing life has to offer. A gardener, she shares with us her experiences with bees, butterflies and birds. A traveler, she takes us on a trip to Cleveland that is just as captivating as her sojourn through England. She falls in love, and introduces us to a friend who has a praying mantis that crawls up her sleeve. Her book inspires a reverence for life, exemplified in a poem in which she describes coaxing a hummingbird out of her garage to freedom: "I stand still as a tree, broom like / a straight branch. In seconds, / he alights on the straw ends. Slowly, / I walk with him, like an acolyte / carrying a cross...." If this is what life does, it is something we all want and need.

David Lee Garrison, author of Playing Bach in the D.C. Metro and Light in the River



In Anne Randolph's poetry collection you will meet cedar waxwings, red-brown thrashers and purple finches. And flowers: blazing star, butterfly weed and rare dwarf larkspur, their very names poems. But she doesn't neglect human nature, including detailed portraits of the villagers she loves, a few whom she's lost. Her poetry is thoroughly accessible, recreating the natural world of her little part of west-central Ohio. In the course of the book's five artfully-arranged chapters, we travel from the mystical wild backyard of her Ohio village to the English peaks and back. Randolph abundantly characterizes "this silent symphony, this astonishing dance" of life in its infinite, astonishing variety.

Ed Davis, author of Time of the Light and The Psalms of Israel Jones



Poet Anne Randolph brings to mind Mary Oliver in her ecstatic embrace of the natural world, her wonder and appreciation for gardens and woods, coyotes and monarchs, fireflies and constellations. In "This is What Life Does," Randolph focuses her keen gaze and graceful language on not only the natural world, but also the pleasures of small-town life, the passage of time, and the surprise of a late-life love. These poems are illuminating, big-hearted and wise.

Diane Chiddister, author of One More Day