Text By Andra Moss
Photo by Babs Perkins

The old red barn on Colebrook Road was an ideal setting for the reading by Sarah Alcott Anderson from her first published book of poetry, “We Hold On To What We Can” (Loom Press). On an early August afternoon, the large crowd of invited guests, distributed in folding chairs across the broad drive of her parents Jennifer Almquist and Tom Fahsbender’s Five Barn Farm, listened intently as the poet shared several pieces exploring loss, longing, motherhood and place.

Anderson grew up writing poetry in nearby New Preston, Conn., and now chairs the English department at Berwick Academy in Maine. Together with her musician husband, Ben, she runs The Word Barn in Exeter, N.H., a gathering space they created to promote the sharing and cultivation of the arts. While her debut collection of poems was 12 years in the making, Anderson shares that “some of these poems grew up alongside my children, while others only just turned off the dirt road and arrived.” 

Anderson describes her intimate writing as “mostly plainspoken poems,” some of which were written “for my younger self, some as a way to capture today, and others for a stranger lifetimes from now.” She has grouped the poems in four loosely thematic sections. One is childhood oriented and taps into her own recollections of life with her twin sister in beloved Connecticut forests and farmlands; others reflect her journey as a parent. She prefaced her reading of the piece “Caught” with a comment on how the impulse to protect one’s children is fierce and never-ending. “Waiting” captures the anxious hours before her sister gives birth. The poem “Warning” looks back on choices made:

If a man walks you to the top of a hill
on the windiest, coldest January day, you risk
more than frostbite. They say this, and I know.
One day you will be an old woman
watching a film of yourself. It will be snowing.
You’ll see when you fell for his words. Now,
picture theatres filled with people on the edges
of their seats, whispering, shouting
Make the right choice. So, these highway flares
are no more than a show. You drove
right past them. We all do.

Deeply personal, yet utterly accessible, Anderson’s “wise and elegant” collection, writes reviewer Nina MacLaughlin in the New England Literary News, “deposits us in landscapes geographic—New England, Ireland, woods, field, front porches—and emotional.” MacLaughlin locates the pulse of the collection in her observation of how deftly Anderson’s work “reminds us of the simple rhythms, and the ripples that move backward and forward across time, touching us in the right now.” 

“We Hold On To What We Can” is available for purchase at LoomPress.com.