Review:
Meteor Shower by Anne Whitehouse
Meteor Shower by Anne Whitehouse
In Meteor Shower, Anne Whitehouse performs a delicate balancing act between the evanescence of life and the coming oblivion that is mortality’s ineluctable end. The poems in her collection dance across the expanse of time as she sorrows for what she has been forced to give up with each step, and yet still finds again in joyful glimpses of her younger self, much like the beautiful traces of “once living selves” in falling leaves. The natural world is the jewel through which many of her words shimmer. She moves from the stark ivory finality of walrus bones and a narrow fox skeleton to brush against eternity in her poem, “Glimpse of Glory,” where she realizes that her dying grandmother was never gaining her physical strength back, but rather “her spirit was readying for the infinite.” As Whitehouse yearns “to live gently” in a world where no one can choose their end, readers will yearn, too, lost in her sidereal verse that seeks to bridge finite limits to connect with the immensity of being human—and beyond.
—Sarah Page, Co-editor, Young Ravens Literary Review