Nightfall
Reviews for Nightfall:
In the twenty years that I’ve read the work of Anne Valley-Fox, she’s remained one of the most important poetic voices of the Southwest, and Nightfall is another brilliant achievement. She uses words in a sly but iconoclastic way to make the reader see the world anew again. Valley-Fox employs Nightfall as a springboard to not only examine death but to be fully alive in the mysteries of life. Once digested, the reader isn’t so afraid of the inevitable darkness.
—Lawrence Welsh, author of Begging for Vultures: New and Selected Poems, 1994-2009
Poet Anne Valley-Fox has a beautiful, wide gaze . . . .
—Joanne Kyger, author of On Time
In her poem “Some Old Sparrow,” Anne Valley-Fox says:
Today (neither bright nor early)
I wake to the fact I am no highflier
but some old sparrow with cataracts
bobbing for insects, intermittently chirping.
It is a brave statement. This is what makes a poet, that one clear, true note, amongst all the chirping. In her collection Nightfall Anne Valley-Fox hits that note again and again.
—Louis Jenkins, author of Before You Know It: Prose Poems 1970-2005
Anne Valley-Fox has always been generous and straightforward with her vision. In this marvelous collection, her refined and well-crafted poems peel away the dark layers of consciousness, the “wedding cakes and wakes,” the “boggy ache” of our modern world. In the end, hers is a wise and time-tested stand: “Huddle with trolls on the footbridge, brush off the shroud, sing louder.”
—John Brandi, author of The World, The World