In Doug Anderson’s newest collection, Undress, She Said, we accompany a speaker undaunted by the complex reckonings of history, evolving relationships, and an aging body, a speaker that, besieged by a storm, resolves to “set out into it, the wind / playing the rigging like a harp.” Over and over in these pages, Anderson makes music of the gales and rain and turbulent sea. These poems voyage from the subtle violences of a religious upbringing to complex remembrances of time served in the Vietnam War to contemporary emergencies of real and political plagues. Yet, no matter the subject, compassion rudders these lyrics as they turn always and at last to myriad beloveds-the enigmatic Angel of Death, literary and mythological influences, kind strangers, the constantly elusive and elusively constant moon. These words reach out to the reader the way the poet addresses frozen joy from the confines of winter: “Red berry trapped in ice, / let me touch you."
