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Poets of the Monterey Bay

 
cover Affection for the Unknowable

Poems by Len Anderson

cover

Praise for Affection for the Unknowable:

“I wish I owned several Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry so I could give them to deserving poets.  I would make an award to Len Anderson whose intelligent heart makes a clear space in our brains, so we can find room for more imagination.  Maybe this is what physicists do, or should do.  And he is, after all a physicist as well as a poet.  When I read this book, my thoughts have more imagination then ever before and I feel that the world is fair indeed to give us, on a gray day like this, the work of Len Anderson.”
         —Grace Cavalieri, author of 13 books of poetry and 18 produced plays and host of the radio show “The Poet and the Poem” from the Library of Congress.


“Len Anderson’s Affection for the Unknowable might have included a subtitle: News from the Universe, for the poems in this book explore not only the personal world of the poet, but also the world of Quantum Theory and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty, the world of physics and philosophy, ghazals of dark matter and the duende of Flamenco, the spectral lines of hydrogen and our kinship with a redwood tree.  Len Anderson’s poems manage this universe with clarity, candor, wit, compassion, and intelligence.  This is a book of wonder and marvels.  Len Anderson is a poet whose work bridges the Twentieth Century and the New Millennium.”
         —Joseph Stroud, author of Below Cold Mountain.


Affection for the Unknowable draws particular strength from its reverential exploration of a life alternately informed by a somber and trenchant perspective and an infectious jouissance.   In reading this collection, there were extraordinary moments when I felt simultaneously humbled, awed and terrified, yet ultimately restored by the wisdom and vibrancy inherent in Anderson’s world-view.  His poetic voice is always a breath, a heartbeat, or a self-deprecating stumble away from the numinous.  His book is an astonishing gift to us all.”
         —Calder Lowe, Executive Editor of The Montserrat Review


Read a review by Chris Watson in the Santa Cruz Sentinel.


Read Joan Zimmerman’s weblog review.


Len Anderson was born and raised on the San Francisco Peninsula and received his BA and PhD in physics from the University of California, Berkeley.   As a physicist he worked in experimental elementary particle physics at Berkeley and in Europe; in private industry he developed sensors for the automation of paper manufacturing.  His poetry has appeared in Bellowing Ark, The Dallas Review, DMQ Review, The Montserrat Review, Quarry West, The Sand Hill Review and Sarasota Review of Poetry.  He is a winner of the Dragonfly Press Poetry Competition and the Mary Lonnberg Smith Poetry Award.  He and his wife live in Santa Cruz County, California.  He is a co-founder of Poetry Santa Cruz.


Affection for the Unknowable by Len Anderson.  Released October, 2003.
104 pages, paperback, $12, ISBN 0-9716373-5-0

 
Poems by Len Anderson


 

Copyright 2003, 2004