“If you pared away from religion all crust of disguise to find fresh belief in daily miracles, if then you could situate your belief in moments of insight and wonder, and if you could make what’s left as essence into poems of self-evident faith as clean and helpful as sun and rain, as rivers and familial affections, you would have this book, each page a kind of dawn. One by one, the poems in Love Calls Us Here gift us with something small and bright. They never say too much. Nothing fancy, nothing explained, belabored, nothing but an episode of what I have to call grace. There is no other word. Just enough.” —Kim Stafford, author of As the Sky Begins to Change
“Chris Anderson’s collection Love Calls Us Here gives the reader a sense of wonder and gratitude for life’s joys and sorrows. For this poet, both mundane and extraordinary events are a call to meaning. From his dog eating his rosary to the death of a loved one, Anderson generously invites us in in a spirit of humility, empathy, curiosity, and openness.” — Rita Simmonds, author of Souls and the City
“Chris Anderson’s Love Calls Us Here evokes God’s best name as Love (1 John 4:16). Not only that, throughout the entire collection one is reminded of George Herbert’s understanding of prayer as ‘Heaven in Ordinarie.’ Take, and read.” — Owen F. Cummings, Distinguished Regents’ Professor of Theology, Mount Angel Seminary and author of Deacons and the Church
“Each poem in this lively collection drops us into the midst of things of this world—a party, a hospital room, a family at the baptismal font, a boy chasing a dog chasing a deer. In each of them we are led to a moment of awareness: God meets us here. They are deeply reassuring. They are also whimsical and poignant and surprising, sometimes breathtakingly apt. Readers will want to reread them, then hasten out and share them with friends.” — Marilyn McIntyre, author of Word by Word: A Daily Spiritual Practice
“Tender, richly-imagined, and often wryly funny—The scientist at the party marches up and demands / that I prove the Resurrection to him, right / there by the clam dip—the poems in Love Calls Us Here bear profound and poi- gnant witness to the sacrament of the present moment, “the only place where we experience the eternal,” as Charles Simic has written. In these poems, as in Chris Anderson’s previous collections, we encounter divine love alive less in the abstractions of belief than through our participation in it, in the most ordinary moments of our lives. In the title poem, a busy server abandons her trays of orders to listen to a patron’s grief: And in my mind / her kindness and the old man’s grief and the mystery / of death and all the stories and the sadness / in that crowded place seem to rise up and come together […]. In ‘Valvoline,’ a priest flies to a remote Alaskan village to perform Last Rites, and—having forgotten to bring his holy oil— anoints the dying man with engine lubricant. It is hard to see the face of Jesus, declares the speaker in “The Elements.” And yet, by the light that passes through these poems, we do.” —Donna Henderson, author of The Eddy Fence
