[These notes were made in 1989:].
Ballads and Sonnets appears to have been a "best of" based on earlier collections, of which this is one; there is considerable overlap. One of the benefits of getting a somewhat less "selected" selection is that, in the very redundancy of treatment of certain themes, one gets to know the mental landscape of the poet a bit better. For instance, Anderson's Scots poems (and there's a fair sampling) are all of a piece - they're all mother-and-child tales (usually in the voice of the mother) with a moral pointed at the end. There are (as one expects from "Surfaceman") lots of railway poems, but one is a little unprepared for them all to be about violent death. Anderson is really acutely aware of the vulnerability of human flesh in comparison with the iron monsters. My own impatience with conventional Victorian religious/moral sensibilities may be keeping me from properly appreciating Anderson's "angel" poems - again a distinct subgenre. Give me rather (a thousand times over!) the mother's well-observed comments on a baby's first steps than laboured pseudo-Shelleyan abstractions. Keats seems to be another landmark in Anderson's mental landscape - he's brought up several times. If one must read minor Victorian poetry, this is certainly more palatable than most.
 - Alexander Anderson, George Gilfillan)
