The Water Garden and Other Poems

The poems in THE WATER GARDEN fall into two main categories. Some are a personal response to prophetic utterances in the Old and New Testaments of the Christian Bible. Others derive from the observation and attention given to “particulate things and experiences”. They give a sense of the poet’s focus on the creative works of others, writers such as Keats and Wordsworth and Chuang Tzu, holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, philosopher Wittgenstein, Christian mystic Jacob Boehme, sociologist Max Weber, and painters Edward Hopper, Georges Seurat, Renoir and of course Monet, whose painting, “The Water Garden at Giverny”, from his Water Lilies series, is significantly referenced in the title of Anley’s collection. We find here also responses to the lyrics of popular, folk and traditional songs and to the art of Australian aborigine people.

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Vernon L. Anley’s poems always have a definite and discoverable meaning, Although they often point beyond themselves, they are symbolic only in a sense of being evocative of particulate things and experiences. They can be read and reread with increasing pleasure.