Sensuously attentive to the world, intensely imagined, and musically driven, Light Falls Through You is a book that remembers the victims – of war, of atrocity, of casual violence – and calls upon language to render homage. Whether she is bringing poetry elegiacally to the service of an individual, to the masses of Rwandan dead or the casualties of the Montreal massacre, Anne Simpson writes with
meditative insight balanced by imaginative reach and an intense musicality. In "Usual Devices" she gives an account of the Trojan War in a sequence about punctuation marks, deftly and wittily revealing the entrenchment of epic violence in the ordinary traffic signs of syntax. And the book's closing poem weaves an altarpiece appropriate to our time out of everyday elements, a homemade icon whose yearning toward coherence, toward closure and hope, is a brave, articulate music for the century's end. From that place "where we came into it/with our disbelief," Simpson's poems point to the imaginative place where "we remember the miraculous."

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Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia profile
League of Canadian Poets profile

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Anne Simpson is the author of three books of poetry, Light Falls Through You, winner of the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Atlantic Poetry Prize; Loop, winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize and a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry; and, most recently, Quick. Her first novel, Canterbury Beach, was shortlisted for the Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award. In 1997 her short story “Dreaming Snow” shared the Journey Prize, and in 1999 she was awarded the Bliss Carman Poetry Award. Simpson lives in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, where she helped establish the Writing Centre at St. Francis Xavier University.

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