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)