An Evening of Poetry March 19, 2009

Charlotte Muse: A Story Also Grows
Idris Anderson: Mrs. Ramsay's Knee

Menlo Park poet Charlotte Muse presents her unified collection of poetry about Ascencion Solorsano de Cervantes, a famous herbal healer and the last known fluent speaker of Mutsun, the language of the Amah Mutsun tribe that lived near California's central coast. The tribe was forced into slavery and built the mission San Juan Bautista. Ascencion Solorsano was buried in the cemetery at Mission San Juan Bautista.

Volume 12 in the Swenson Poetry Award Series, Mrs. Ramsay’s Knee offers fresh and elegant poems by Menlo Park resident Idris Anderson, many of them ekphrastic considerations of visual works of art. Among her subjects are paintings by Rembrandt, Rousseau, Pollock, and Chagall, yet she equally explores a set of news photos from the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah.

Idris Anderson's voice is both compassionate and calm, yet she brings a vivid imaginative world to light, illuminating art and life alike. This poetry is as full of feeling as intelligence, drawing the reader ever closer to that intimacy with the human condition that brings true understanding. In selecting her work to win the Swenson Poetry Award for 2008, Harold Bloom wrote, "The grave, measured poetic voice won me instantly."

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