The first new and selected edition to be published at Ashland Poetry Press for many years, A. V. Christie’s More Here Than Light includes poems from five previous collections as well as new work written before her death. She is not new to Ashland Poetry Press as her book The Housing was a winner of the Robert McGovern Prize. Poet Elizabeth Spires writes of A. V. Christie’s poems,
The poems in More Here Than Light are full of hard-won truths, in which the intensity of the poet’s experience is supported by language, phrasing, syntax, and structure. Reading these poems is to watch A. V. Christie growing, evolving, taking risks, and writing, in the most honest, unflinching way possible, about the pressing concerns of life’s successive stages: the formation and disintegration of families, the beginning and end of a marriage, the bond between mother and child, the exigencies of artistic making, and finally the painful confrontation with her own mortality. Christie’s poetic “task,” as I imagine it, was to come to a deeper understanding of herself and the external forces which shaped her life and the lives of those around her.
