Anthony S. Abbott

(January 7, 1935-October 3, 2020)

Anthony (Tony) S. Abbott ( 1935-2020) was recipient of the 2015 NC Award for Literature from the State of North Carolina, and is the author of eight books of poetry, two novels, and four books of literary criticism. His book of poems, The Angel Dialogues (Lorimer Press, 2014), was the recipient of honorable mention in the 2015 Brockman-Campbell competition of the North Carolina Poetry Society, and his 2011 book of poems, If Words Could Save Us, was the co-winner in that same competition in 2012. His acclaimed first novel, Leaving Maggie Hope, won the Novello Award in 2003 and was published by Novello Press.

Tony was born in San Francisco and educated at the Fay School in Southborough, Massachusetts, and Kent School in Kent, Connecticut, he received his AB from Princeton University, magna cum laude, in 1957. With the support of a Danforth Fellowship he received his AM from Harvard University in 1960 and his PhD in 1962. An instructor in English at Bates College for three years beginning in 1961, he joined the English Department at North Carolina’s Davidson College in 1964. He became Full Professor in 1979 and was named Charles A. Dana Professor of English in 1990. He served as the Chair of the Department from 1989 to 1996. Modern Drama, creative writing, and literature and religion his major fields of interest, he is the author of two critical studies, Shaw and Christianity and The Vital Lie: Reality and Illusion in Modern Drama.

His first volume of poems, The Girl in the Yellow Raincoat, was published by St. Andrews Press in 1989 and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. His second poetry collection, A Small Thing Like a Breath was published by St. Andrews Press in 1993, and his third, The Search for Wonder in the Cradle of the World in 2000. A fourth collection, The Man Who, received the Oscar Arnold Young Award and was published by Main Street Rag Publishing Company in 2005.

His 2003 novel, Leaving Maggie Hope, was followed by its sequel, The Three Great Secret Things, published in 2007 by Main Street Rag Publishing Company. He returned to poetry in 2009 with his New and Selected Poems, published by Lorimer Press, which also published his next two poetry collections, If Words Could Save Us and The Angel Dialogues, mentioned at the outset of this biography.

In addition to his teaching, for which Davidson College honored him in 1969 with the Thomas Jefferson Award and in 1997 with the Hunter-Hamilton Love of Teaching Award, Tony also served as President of the Charlotte Writers Club, the North Carolina Writers Network, and the North Carolina Poetry Society. Tony died in hospice surrounded by his family on October 3, 2020, one week before his induction into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame. Dark Side of North, is his last collection of poems, published by Press 53 on January 7, 2021: Tony’s birthday.

Praise for Dark Side of North

In Dark Side of North, Anthony S. Abbott writes, “The wisdom of age is nonsense.” He shows the way becoming older discovers joys and sorrows.  The poet’s heart opens to experiences, while the daughter he grieves for in The Girl in the Yellow Raincoat forms more drama in lasting Love.

—Shelby Stephenson, North Carolina Poet Laureate (2015-2018)

The most sublime images swim like minnows through Anthony Abbott’s poetry in his latest collection, Dark Side of North. He is a poet of the celebrated life, its ecstasies, its ordinary moments and its sorrows. The daughter who died early (“The thing is, I miss you more than ever.”) Waiting for Beethoven’s “Fifth” to finish playing at the local post office “because I could not bear to let it finish without me.” How the poet drives down the interstate with one hand, and with the other conducts the finale of the Russian anthem of Pyotr Ilyich. His friends and relatives who have died, one of whom he addresses, “I see you . . . walking towards us . . . telling us to live.” Driving for the Red Cross and trying to memorize a Dylan Thomas poem. Telling us, as he moves into the “starched heaven” of the retirement home, “What matters is the surge of the soul / down the steps to the water, what / matters is the color of the sky. . .” This collection is Abbott at his most playful, his most emphatic and his most tender.

—Dannye Romine Powell, author of In the Sunroom with Raymond Carver

Stunning, lyrical, elegiac, and spiritual, Dark Side of North is Anthony S. Abbott’s magnum opus. Its pages are filled with heartache and humor, wonder and wisdom, faith and fierceness, love and loss, grit and grace. Dark Side of North breaks your heart and then stitches it back together again—seamlessly. The poems provide a rare peephole into the heart-space of a man who traverses the terrain of the third stage of life, and now courageously stands on the threshold of death’s cabin in the woods. As such, the collection speaks hope directly into our particular pandemic cultural moment of loss, lament, and self-introspection. Thanks to Abbott’s brilliance, readers of this book will rediscover how to “receive each morning as a wrapped gift,” and find themselves pointed once again toward their true north.

—Dr. Jacqueline Bussie, author of Love Without Limits and Outlaw Christian

Over years and years, I’ve read each of Tony Abbott’s books, marveled at his trajectory, astonished that with each book, each poem, he grew wiser, more candid and cannier, more nakedly vulnerable—better and better. If there’s a book of poetry for this catastrophic season we are attempting to navigate, it’s Abbott’s latest, Dark Side of North, a volume of such valence and heft, courage and elegiac glory, that “saints . . . spin their webs around us and wait / to catch us unawares” and even “the crosses on the dogwood blossoms tremble in terror.” Each chiseled, wonderfully conversational poem acknowledges the shimmering, often blinding world, out of which the poet has wrought a personal mythology. Unmistakably autobiographical, deeply contemplative, Dark Side of North excludes nothing, its doors flung wide and beckoning to the least of these—a séance and christening at once. To declare a poet’s new volume his best—especially a poet (and novelist) of Tony Abbott’s stature, who year upon year has consistently dished up his best—risks hyperbole. Nevertheless, Dark Side of North strikes me as that volume in Abbott’s oeuvre. It’s a big book, a brimming opus of the heart and soul, an ample primer on the sacramental moments of life, the Muse having toiled overtime to commend to this poet luminous language that issues from another realm.

—Joseph Bathanti, North Carolina Poet Laureate (2012-2014)