Spells: New and Selected Poems

by Annie Finch

A spellbinding collection from one of America's most original and magical poets

Annie Finch's Spells brings together her most memorable and striking poems written over forty years. Finch's uniquely mysterious voice moves through the book, revealing insights on the classic themes of love, spirituality, death, nature, and the patterns of time. A feminist and pagan, Finch writes poems as "spells" that bring readers to experience words not just in the mind, but in the body. Celebrated for her extraordinary love and knowledge of poetic craft, over the course of her career Finch has shaped her own innovative and radically traditional aesthetic. Her strange but familiar metrical language decenters the Self, creating a new, more open emotional relationship between ourselves, other people, and the world. Spells displays Finch's virtuosity in a broad range of genres and forms, from lyrics, chants, and narrative poems to performance pieces, poetic drama, and verse translation. The book also includes a number of new and previously unpublished poems, notably her 1980s-era "Lost Poems," experimental work in meter that prefigures postmodern reclamations of poetic form. This wonderfully talented poet gives voice to the female and earth-centered spirituality of our era. Her emotionally eloquent and rhetorically powerful work will echo in the reader's ear long after the book is closed. Check for the online reader's companion at

Genres: Poetry

236 pages, Hardcover

First published April 2, 2013

About the author

Annie Finch is the author of six books of poetry, including Spells: New and Selected Poems, The Poetry Witch Little Book of Spells, Calendars and Eve (both finalists for the National Poetry Series), and the verse play Among the Goddesses: An Epic Libretto in Seven Dreams (Sarasvati Award, 2012). Her poems have appeared onstage at Carnegie Hall and in The Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Her other works include poetry translation, poetics, poetry anthologies, and a poetry textbook. She is also the editor of Choice Words: Writers on Abortion (Haymarket Books, 2020). Annie Finch holds a Ph.D from Stanford, served for a decade as Director of the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing, and has lectured on poetry at Berkeley, Toronto, Harvard, and Oxford. In 2010 she was awarded the Robert Fitzgerald Award for her lifetime contribution to the art and craft of Versification. Finch has collaborated on poetic ritual theater productions with artists in theater, dance, and music and has performed as Poetry Witch on three continents. She teaches poetry and magic at PoetryWitchCommunity.org. 

“My poems harness the magically diverse and deeply rooted craft of poetic rhythms and forms. Like spells, they enjoy being spoken aloud three times." —Annie Finch

Annie on Twitter @poetrywitch
Annie on Instagram @thepoetrywitch

Annie connects with readers and facilitates seasonal rituals and classes in poetry and meter in her online community,
PoetryWitchCommunity.org, open to all who identify as women or gender-nonconforming.

Want more info? Updates, videos, poems, spells, spellsletter signup, and more at anniefinch.net

Blessings to all my beautiful readers!

Reviews

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

A TOP SHELF review originally published in The Monitor

Mystery and Prosody

Annie Finch has spent more than three decades crafting poetry that straddles the border between neo-formalist preoccupation with form (meter, rhyme, stanzas) and the lyrical, experimental tendencies of modernism. Seeing the visceral tug of prosody (study of rhythm, meter) as a way to center the self in a nature-rooted, community-bound sort of spirituality, Finch embraces traditional and even archaic forms while simultaneously reshaping them to produce the heightened emotional reveal valued in lyric poetry. Her latest collection, Spells: New and Selected Poems, traces the evolution of her esthetic in reverse order, beginning with her most recent, critically acclaimed work and moving backward in time to 1970 before sampling her performance works and translations.

The newer poems by Finch bear many of her hallmarks: imagery rooted in nature and the body, a preoccupation with humanity’s relationship with the earth. “Earth Day” finds her reflecting “All we need is to touch the planet / and find it clean where were born,” and in “Revelry” the human world is subsumed: “Chairs root. Their trunks are runged with snow. / Curtains grow velvet thick, like bark.” Her work from the last decade of the 20th century celebrate the cyclical, ancient changes of the seasons (as in “Samhain,” and “Summer Solstice Chant”) or the myriad mythological faces of Shakti, the divine maternal force (my favorites were “Inanna” with its powerful line “The young goddess is dead, and waiting” and “Coatlique,” whose final image will stay with me for a long time: “The skulls are breathing, / as quiet in her necklace / as darkness will keep them”). Older pieces often focus on the female experience and sexuality (or its repression/violation). Among those that moved me were “Song of the Sorry Side” (“On the sorry, sorry side of the world / is an opening that hides the girl / who is closing up her heart”) and “Inside the Violet” (“My own eye was lost / in the echoing hold of the raw deep I saw”).

Spells wraps up with samples of her verse plays, evocative of Greek drama and steeped in myths and folklore Finch has appropriated and given fresh nuance to. Her translations, especially of French poet Louise Labé, are supple and accomplished. Throughout the collection, the poet demonstrates an impressive command of meter, moving expertly from smooth iambs to meatier trochees and dactyls. From sonnets to more obscure forms like the ghazal, Finch deftly constructs rhymes both perfect and slant that never feel forced or juvenile. An amazingly gifted voice at the height of her talents. Spells will simply leave you enchanted.

[World Literature Today]

"Everyone should have a copy of Annie Finch’s Spells on their shelf, for those hours when patterned rhythm and sound seem the best approximation of the soul’s speaking." - Jeanetta Calhoun Mish, Oklahoma City University

This book was reviewed in the January 2014 issue of World Literature Today. Read the full review by visiting our website: http://bit.ly/1iGLXY4

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of my most recent favorites of poetry I have read. I enjoyed the entire book. There were a few poems I did not connect with but the majority of the poems touched me and connected to my own experiences. This was a goodreads giveaway win.

[Brenda M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Favorite poems:
Blessing on the Poets
Frost's Grave
Earth Day
Over Dark Arches
Walk with Me
Winter Solstice Chant
A Wreath for Beltane
Coatlique
Nut
No Snake
Invocation

[Lily · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I had high expectations of this collection, because spells as a title is a potent metaphor, there's a lot to do with that. What I found was neat, formal poems, metered and while the pagan/earthen/feminist subtexts resonated, I think I had high hopes and expectations that I wasn't as affected or touched by this collection as I'd hoped. It was worth reading, just not as luminous and spellbinding as I expected spells to be!

[Robin Helweg-Larsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Annie Finch is a feminist and a pagan, to which I am sympathetic despite being an atheist male. However it is her skill as a formalist that mostly appeals to me. She exercises this in several ways in 'Spells' - and as the book covers 40 years of poetry, that is no surprise. The best I can do is to quote little bits I like from several poems, showing not just her skills but her interests:

Time-keeper and -hater, wake-sleeper, sleep-waker;
May language's language, the silence that lies
Under each word, move you over and over,
Turning you, wondering, back to surprise.
(Blessing on the Poets) Her opening invocation, charming and, unusually, capitalising the start of each line.

Two bodies, balanced in mass and power,
move in a bed through the dark,
under the earliest human hour.
A night rocks, like an ark.
(Two Bodies) Simple stanzas, clean and rhythmic, sensual, and the images concluding with conception.

When I cut words you never may have said
into fresh patterns, pierced in place with pins,
(Letter for Emily Dickinson) She references Emily Dickinson elsewhere as a major influence. In this poem she creates a nonce form of two 11-line stanzas with not just the rhyme scheme but the rhymes themselves (though not the words) repeated.

Reaching with eyes, they covered her as a girl,
leaving a grain of gaze, that irritant stare
women must cover everywhere, like pearl.
(Pearl) A very elegant, very feminist, villanelle.

Out of old earth that the worms ate
the grim garden began to grow
as peas, dull dragons, unwound and dipped
rough leaves the land had licked,
(The Grim Garden) Here she has kept a strong rhythm, but dropped rhyme in favour of alliteration, giving a somewhat archaic feel to the poem that is in keeping with the theme and the imagery.

How could we two write lines of rhyme
were we not fond of numbered Time
(Coy Mistress) Annie Finch responds coyly to Andrew Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress' with a defence of Marvell's enemy, Time. A very witty formal piece.

In addition to such pieces, 'Spells' includes a section of Performance Works which I found out of place and completely uninteresting.

And lastly some translations, including 'The Seafarer' from the Anglo-Saxon and several love sonnets from the French of Louise Labe, which perfectly capture the tone of the originals.

Overall, a very worthwhile and rereadable collection.

[tei hurst · Rating 2 out of 5]

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