Anya Krugovoy Silver, Poetic Voice on Mortality, Dies at 49
Anya Krugovoy Silver, the poet who, after receiving a diagnosis of advanced breast cancer in 2004, wrote lyrical verse that gave readers an exquisite, intimate and sometimes angry account of her illness, died on Monday in Macon, Ga. She was 49.
Andrew Silver, her husband, confirmed the death.
Ms. Silver was pregnant and teaching English literature at Mercer University in Macon when she learned that she had inflammatory breast cancer, a particularly rare and aggressive kind. She gave birth to her only child, Noah; had a mastectomy; and discovered the intensity with which cancer inspired her poetry.
In often sensual poems, she wrote with unswerving candor about living under the threat of imminent death, her love for her son and husband, and the parallel world of advanced cancer, where “healthy people fear us.” In “Stage IV,” she wrote:
Faces turn away from me — I’m taboo, now —
the boat I’m set inside is crowded
with others like myself —
they come from their own cities.
Cautiously, we take each other’s hands
and trade stories.
The poems Ms. Silver wrote before her illness, published in literary journals like The Iowa Review and Image magazine, explored religion, love, womanhood, spirituality, the body and other subjects. Those concerns were magnified by her cancer, which became her “flood subject,” as Emily Dickinson referred to immortality.
“My poetry got better,” she said in an interview with Macon magazine in 2010. “Nothing focuses your mind and helps you see clearly what’s important quite like cancer. It made me want to explore, even more, the beauty and divinity of the ordinary world.”
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When she received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation this year, the foundation said that her work “engages with the trauma of chronic and terminal illness, and with religious faith and mystery, storytelling, memory, and the risks and rewards of being human.”
Ms. Silver was not worried about making readers uncomfortable. It was, she said, her mission to be honest. And if the truth stung, so be it.
“I have a tremendous amount of joy in my life, and my joy exists with pain,” she said in an interview with Georgia Public Radio in January. “I don’t see those two things as completely separate. All of life is woven together, and separating the strands is impossible.”
In “Psalm 137 for Noah” (2016), she raised questions about raising a child who was not guaranteed to have his mother for very long.
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“Forgive me your birth in this strange land,” she wrote, and continued:
I wanted your infant kisses, your fists clasped
round my neck. I craved you, though you were born
in the wake of my illness, my dim prognosis.
I was selfish: I willed you this woe, this world.
You inherited exile for my sake.
Ms. Silver said that she felt guilty about becoming a mother, knowing that her son was likely to lose his mother at an early age. But, as she told Georgia Public Radio, “I decided that the joy of life and the beauty and connection of life were more important than the chance of suffering.”
At the time of the interview, she said, Noah had not read the poem.
Anya Christine Krugovoy was born on Dec. 22, 1968, in Media, Pa., and was raised in nearby Swarthmore. Her Swiss-born mother, Christel (Hofmann) Krugovoy, was a child-care provider. Her father, George, an immigrant from Ukraine, taught Russian literature at Swarthmore College.
Young Anya spoke Russian and German, her parents’ native languages, before she began to speak English, at age 3 or 4.
She declined to read “War and Peace” — not even for the $100 offered by her father, a towering figure who wrote a book about the Russian novelist and playwright Mikhail Bulgakov. But the love of Russian and Eastern European literature that Mr. Krugovoy ignited in his daughter eventually resonated when she became sick and poets like Anna Akhmatova attuned her to “urgent questions of life and death,” Mr. Silver said.
She was in the fourth grade when she wrote her first poem, “Snowflakes,” but her teacher was not supportive.
“My teacher, who was not very kind, would yell at me in front of the whole class for staring out the window and daydreaming,” she told Macon magazine. “But in fact, that’s basically what I do now when I write a poem — stare out my window and contemplate.”
After receiving a bachelor’s degree in English and creative writing at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, where her literary influences included the Brothers Grimm and Rainer Maria Rilke, she taught high school in Mississippi for a year before earning a Ph.D. in English from Emory University in Atlanta. In 1998 she began teaching at Mercer, where her husband is also an English professor.
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She published four volumes of poetry: “The Ninety-Third Name of God” (2010), “I Watched You Disappear” (2014), “from nothing” (2016) and “Second Bloom” (2017).
In addition to her husband, son and mother, Ms. Silver is survived by her sister, Claudia Krugovoy.
Ms. Silver, who passionately corresponded online with other women with Stage IV cancer and dedicated some of her poems to them, wrote movingly in “Three Roses” about the aftermath of her mastectomy.
“Where only my scar line remains, a red rose blooms,” she began.
Luscious, full, so open that if it dropped a single petal,
it would not be as lovely as it is this very moment.
My eyes watch through the rose’s flaming center,
crimson, as if through a hundred desiring eyes —
till the world prisms: quartz pink, blush, vermilion.
She continued to write until her final days — in longhand, as always, and in a journal. She declared that she would be moving in a more overtly political direction, but continued to focus on her illness. In “Metastatic,” she described a seething rage that made her want to “scream until the scream knocks me to my knees.”
She concluded by saying:
I have nothing to lose.
If you push me off a building, I’ll sing.
I’d jump in front of a bullet if I could.
I’d let someone wring my neck if only
I knew it would hurt God just one bit to watch me die.
Correction:
An earlier version of this obituary, using information from Ms. Silver’s family, misstated the country where her mother was born. She was born in Switzerland, not Germany.
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