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72 | MACON MAGAZINE DECEMBER/JANUARY 2017 M y thirst for life gets deeper / and deeper the less of it remains," writes the narrator of "Benediction," a poem from Mercer professor Anya Krugovoy Silver's third collection "From Nothing." That's a cohesive thread throughout much of Silver's poetry – the brutal interplay between living and dying, and the startling clarity of vision of a poet who has faced her own mortality. Silver was diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer at age 35, while pregnant with her son; she's been living with cancer ever since, treating recurrences as they present themselves, teaching and parenting and loving and thriving, but with the sharply observational nature of someone who has lived, eyes wide open, through an experience that counts itself among all our worst fears. "Having cancer is awful, so I'm not romanticizing it in any way, but it has given me a perspective on life. I feel like I'm a member of this secret club of people who know something that other people don't know," Silver recently said in a conversation about writing with chronic illness published in Atticus Review. She's been transformed, and these poems express that transformation in all its myriad iterations; there's anger here, and longing. Urgency and raw honesty. Desire, intimacy and love. Most of all, there's an almost transcendent sense of peace in the overall tone of the book. It's not a passive peace. There's no "letting-go- and-letting-God" sentimentality here. The peace comes from being both participant and witness to darkness, illness and death. It comes from seeing both the beautiful and the terrible possibilities of transformation, from being forced by circumstances to attune oneself to beauty and grace - and also to watch unflinchingly as those things fall away or return permanently changed in the face of the inevitable. It's a dark beauty, and an appealing, haunting one. Part one of the collection's three sections features poems with a whiff of nostalgia – there are childhood memories laid bare and reconstructed from a viewpoint wizened by suffering, and more recent memories, as in the poem "Coincidence," with its narrator nervously "press[ing] her shorn chest / against an X-ray machine" while ruminating on her sister giving birth to a baby girl at that exact moment – "Praise God for this fearful doubling, / over which I will sometimes weep and curse," she writes, attuned to the dichotomy in her family's world – and in the larger world – every moment, every day. Part two begins with one of the book's heavier poems – "Anguish," in which the narrator openly and without restraint grieves her stillborn daughter. In most of the rest of this section, the poem's subject is an other – sometimes a fictional character such as Snow White, but more often a sick mother, a dying father, a woefully long list of ill friends. That's the thing about cancer – to cope and develop camaraderie, the tendency is to seek out others with similar experiences, but that results in a pool of beloveds who are statistically more prone to relapses and ailments. Silver absorbs these difficulties and artfully transforms them; she's a conduit through which empathy and understanding flow freely. She doesn't shy away from the dark parts, but she understands the necessity of amplifying any available beauty. "Comes a Day" is a moving poem memorializing three women – Vicky, Kelly and Kore – whose deaths have laid so many worlds bare, and its last lines are a balm: "Let's talk only of the sky, the blue, the robins / how the trees hold them, hold them, let them go." The final section captures Silver's perspective at this particular stage in her life; several ekphrastic poems here The Dark Beauty of Anya Silver's Vision Her third collection of poetry embodies pain and grace >> By Traci Burns Holiday Guide