Geoffrey Jacques of Just for a Thrill: Poems
These poems are by turns enigmatic and magnetic. They pull you into a world that is at once familiar and strange. There is a classicism in many of the poems of The Golden Underground that is all the more unexpected because the subject matter-a child's thrill at the gift of a telescope, a casual moment outside a hospital-is the everyday jumble of experience."
Vievee Francis of Blue-Tail Fly
In The Golden Underground, Anthony Butts unearths 'what we feel lying/ beneath surfaces but cannot reach.' Here, the Lady of the Lake, composed of water, traditionally able to reach deep into the earth through root and vine, and Saint Brigid, protector of all bodies of water, guide the poet from city to city, making their presence most known in Michigan, the Third Coast. It is in this realm of unfathomable depths and harsh industry that Butts uses his unusually keen powers of observation to probe the chthonic mystery of the seemingly mundane. In these psalms of 'surprise and anxiety' ultimately it is Woman, writ here in several manifestations: Goddess, Saint, black mother on a bus, who bridges the 'here' to 'there.' Butts, like Hayden before him, writes through a fretwork of symbols and allusions that challenge the reader toward deeper investigations of their own hidden wells."
