"Richard Anderson's Figures of Speech represents an effort to try and find sense within our current world when it seems that little sense exists within it. One thinks of Plato's judgment on how the world exists or has come to exist as a kind of prison. In his own day and during the lifetime of Socrates, a sense existed of decay within the order of human society and in the politics that existed within the Athens of that time. A sense of futility and lack of meaning was pervading the spiritual and moral order and so, in light of this kind of context, whether one is a poet or a philosopher, one tries to take distance and to let one's spirit run as images, thoughts, and feels moves through one's conscious awareness of many different things. The composition of poems exists as one way to cope; perhaps, to escape. A regrettable aspect, however, pertains to the citation of the names of some prominent Republican politicians who are portrayed as sources of danger to the human soul and to the soul of our currently existing society. Republicans would not appreciate Figures of Speech to the extent that they adhere to their political commitments and loyalties although it is possible to hope that, perhaps, some political loyalties will be shaken. We try to resist a notion or sense of life that thinks too much in terms of determinism and an absence of the possibility of new things that could possibly emerge in some very, helpful, joyful unexpected ways."
-Br. Dunstan Robidoux OSB