Lenora Smalley Reviews:

Bare Root: A Poet's Journey With Breast Cancer
by Anne Silver

Anne Silver has been a poet for many years. When she was diagnosed with breast cancer, she used writing poems as stepping stones on a journey through the dark days of surgery and chemotherapy to the light at the end of the darkness. Although anyone who goes through this kind of experience must be a fighter, she says warrior images don't appeal to her. Instead she uses the metaphor of gardening. Her body is being attacked by aphids and needs ladybugs to balance them. Her chemo was bright red, so the image was real to her.

In one of the poems called Mystery she tells of abandonment by her lover and in Changing Partners writes : I slept while a cancer feasted inside of me. My lover, finding the noise disturbing, left.
She is entirely alone, since her family members have died. Yet, their presence surrounds her in the poems.

When I speak of my life, I must talk of trees… I want my words to take root, so my poems may become forests. Come, walk beneath my canopy.

Her poems are like a garden surrounded by trees. Anne says it best in the last two lines of Persephone's Bloom:

A clearing in the woods where flowers break hard ground

Lovely, uncut bouquets connected to each other at the root.