Susan Maxwell Campbell

Anything You Ever Wanted to Know Susan Maxwell Campbell

Susan Maxwell Campbell's collection Anything You Ever Wanted to Know looks at the moments in life when you really learn something important--a father's sensitivity, your parents' mutual unhappiness, a memory you didn't know you had, the longing for art and music, and the enduring love of your grandparents. Many poems turn on the ultimate theological questions of our individual purpose in life and of the nature of good and evil in the world. They brim with images and things imbued with significance that is always there but not felt in the heart until a moment of clarity--the focused "thinking" eye. Campbell's work owes a debt to Ellen Bryant Voigt with her precision and closeness to the natural world and to Elizabeth Bishop with her delicate choices and expressions. This is a collection to read--and to read again.