Volume 12 in the Swenson Poetry Award Series, "Mrs. Ramsay's Knee" offers fresh and elegant poems by Idris Anderson, many of them ekphrastic considerations of visual works of art. Among her subjects are paintings by Rembrandt, Rousseau, Pollock, and Chagall, yet she equally explores a set of news photos from the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah. Idris Anderson's voice is both compassionate and calm, yet she brings a vivid imaginative world to light, illuminating art and life alike. The poet has little interest in ideology, but great concern for lived experience in all its richness. This poetry is as full of feeling as intelligence, drawing the reader ever closer to that intimacy with the human condition that brings true understanding. In selecting her work to win the Swenson Poetry Award for 2008, Harold Bloom wrote, "The grave, measured poetic voice won me instantly."