This charts a poet's trials in facing marital dissolution. Detailing his and his children's spirit-struggles, Axel Haberley must find ways to surmount agony and anger in order to connect with his new world. Believing artistry obliges him as a social visionary, Haberley finds divorce's discord strains his search for poetic responsibility. Verse written under these conditions brings momentary salve, but not the strengthening bulwark of artistic creed. Yet, through determination and time's succor, the poet makes of his verse a map with which to navigate the difficult sojourn through divorce's miasma and toward a clarity of hope that offers a future of meaning. Anthem embraces the poet's journey, and looks at society's great contemporary trauma as one would a poem: to see how it scans, to feel its rhythms, and to ascertain whether it can be decompressed to reveal its own meanings, artistry and redemptive insight.
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