Jan Lee Ande
Reviews of Reliquary
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Mystic in the
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Meredith Davies Hadaway
In Jan Lee Ande's new collection of poems, you can hear stones sing if you've a mind to. Or, according to the poet, spespeak with King Saul, Milton and Michelangelo. With Blakean rapturous vision, Ande looks at trees, birds, sea urchins and stones, and sees the universe: "the space / between its atoms, the whole thing throbbing while galaxies of sparks like dazzled stars flashed by." But Ande's poems also stand on the terra firma of science, painstakingly detailed with the accuracy of a Marianne Moore. The resulting work is a full-bodied and unabashed celebration of the spirit still alive and well within the "reliquary" of the world. Read more
Pattiann Rogers
In Reliquary, Jan Lee Ande has created a steady, contemplative, and sometimes playful voice, often melding perfectly the factual and the fanciful, the hallowed and the sensual. These poems bring new perspectives to the commonplace-a stone, an avocado, a sea urchin-as well as celebration to the mysteries of human experience and the cosmos. Many lines, many cadences of Jan Lee Ande's poems will remain alive with the reader long after this book is closed.
Texas Review Press, 2003
Louis Simpson, Series Judge
Jan Lee Ande's prize winning book, Instructions for Walking on Water, was the first glimpse of a woman who is in miraculously close touch with the inner turnings of the world. In her second book, Reliquary, winner of the X.J. Kennedy Prize from Texas Review Press, the poet again hints in her title of something holy. Read more
X.J. Kennedy
Reliquary strikes me as a remarkable collection, a tonic for mind and spirit. Jan Lee Ande's poems drench this familiar earth with fresh and penetrating light. They wake us up to the fact that we're alive.
© Jan Lee Ande 2007