Catherine Chandler's Poetry Blog

Monday, December 24, 2012

Greeting of the Season !

Christmas stockings near a decorated Christmas tree. ©iStockphoto.com/DNY59


Merry Christmas!

Froehliche Weinachten! 

 счастливого Рождества!

Selamat Hari Natal!

Shub Naya Baras! 
 
Joyeux Noël!

¡Feliz Navidad!

Boldog Karácsonyt!
 
Wesołych Świąt



. . . and thank you for your frequent visits to 
The Wonderful Boat.

Love and Peace,
Catherine Chandler

Thursday, December 20, 2012

"December" by Eric Ormsby

Photo by Ian Britton (www.freefoto.com)


December

December rings in the chill mouths of bells,
The shadowy solicitude of grasses
Eyelashed with precarious snow.
There is a crystalline insistence in the black
Repetitious roof-tops with their shock
Of snow. The ragged chimneys seem
To pray with fingers pinched
Together in entreaty while the luscious
Clouds of winter wallow on grey
Organzas of sundown.

                                            December bows
Under threadbare memories. The spider
In the corners of the house shrivels
To a small, dark claw. At night
Our dreams infringe and pool,
Our common terrors shake us in sleep.

Upriver there are remote
Oceans whose cold waves will ring
Like freezing echoes in the mouths of bells.



- Eric Ormsby (from Bavarian Shrine and other poems, 1990) 
[reprinted with Eric Ormsby's written permission] 

   
 

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

"Vermont Passage"

The Green Mountains of Vermont (Photo: Stockbyte/Stockbyte/Getty Images )



This year, the earliest winter since 1896 will arrive Friday morning, December 21, 2012, with the solstice at 6:12 A.M.

In his recent review of my poetry collection Lines of Flight, Richard Wakefield had this to say about my poem "Vermont Passage":

“Vermont Passage” also transforms a landscape, describing the profuse flowers of summer that linger in memory after summer gives way to cold: “I breathe in honeyed memories of clover, / and winter, for a while at least, is over.” We live in two worlds, or many worlds: the literal “bitter night” of winter, along with our memory of what was, which is also our expectation of what will be. Chandler gives texture to the flat world. If there’s any truth to the cliché that poetry reminds us to stop and smell the roses, Chandler’s poetry reminds us that we can also revel in the smells and sights that linger in our recollection. It is the remembered roses we smell most poignantly.

Richard Wilbur also had a few choice words for the poem when he wrote:

Catherine Chandler's poems — I think particularly of the sonnet "Vermont Passage" — offer the reader a plain eloquence, a keen eye, and a graceful development of thought. (Back cover, Lines of Flight)

Here is "Vermont Passage", which I wrote after a drive through Vermont on my way to Newburyport, Massachusetts in July 2006. The poem was originally published in Mezzo Cammin, Volume 1, Issue 2, Winter 2006.


Vermont Passage

For Deborah Warren


Wildflowers thrive and form, in mid-July,
a buoyant blue and gold receiving line
the length of Interstate Route 89,
as if to welcome friends and passersby.

But high up in the hillside meadow teems
a purple floret whose divine perfume
makes one forget that roses are in bloom--
mellifluous, the stuff of summer dreams.

And when Vermont's Green Mountains turn to white,
when northern folk see little of the sun,
before the sugar maple sap can run,
when better days attend each bitter night,
I breathe in honeyed memories of clover,
and winter, for a while at least, is over.




Source: Wikipedia






Sunday, December 16, 2012

"Lines of Flight" Reviewed in NYQ




Lines of Flight by Catherine Chandler






Lines of Flight
by Catherine Chandler
Able Muse Press 2011
ISBN:  978-0-9865338-3-9
Pages: 98
Reviewed by: Richard Wakefield



Whatever else our brains do – or our hearts, if you prefer a more figurative view – they seem as ineluctably dedicated to reading meaning into the world as our lungs are evolved to separate oxygen from air. It’s as natural as breathing, this process of seeing things in the fourth dimension of significance. Call it the confluence of the outer and inner worlds.

Catherine Chandler is one of the skilled and discerning few who help us navigate the resulting stream. In place of the fragments of meaning glimpsed by most of us most of the time, Chandler gives us a coherent view of the course along which we speed. The view sometimes enlarges us, makes us more at home in the world, and at others forces us to look a little more soberly at the vast and frightening void toward which we are hurled.

In “66” she contemplates a coincidence of toponymy: “Along Route 66, connected by / a six-mile stretch of road, two towns align; / one bears his family name, the other mine.” A charming bit of chance, it seems, a bit of geography that reflects an emotional connection, the kind of thing we might notice and recall as an anecdote. But Chandler traces its meaning far beyond the trivial. “The decommissioned highway’s gone to hell,” she continues, and the fading connection between the two towns becomes a metaphor for the complex ambivalence of human relationships. The road connects; the road separates. We find that we and those we love inhabit “universes spinning parallel.” That may not be the meaning we wanted, but it’s more true to experience than the facile sentimentality we might have preferred.

Someone noted once that poetry gives us tools for living. A poem like “66” does exactly that, nudging us out of complacency and into an awareness that will better serve us. The poem acknowledges the separateness that we work so hard to ignore, and yet, paradoxically, it makes us a little less alone by assuring us that we are not alone in our loneliness.

What better occasion for sentimentality than Mother’s Day? And what can be more oppressive than the narrow, mass-produced emotions that holidays can impose on us? In “Mother’s Day” Chandler opens a woman’s heart to reveal wounds that the woman herself cannot express; in fact, as she weeps, the tyranny of expectations makes others blind to the real meaning of her tears. There must be no more profound loneliness than that. We understand the woman better than those closest to her, and perhaps we understand ourselves and our own loved ones a little better for it.

“Supernova” begins by asking why we should “dull” the beauty of nature with “a lapse to metaphor / or scientific fact, or myth.” A telling word, that “lapse.” Our need to analyze, to probe beneath the surface of beauty, can feel like a fall from grace (perhaps it was that very need that drove Eve to eat the forbidden fruit which, after all, was from the tree of knowledge). At the conclusion of three stanzas that seem to celebrate the “burnished afternoon” in preference to what she will later call “logic, reason, purpose, cause,” the poet asks, “Why resort to words / when hush will do?” The answer comes in the second half of the poem, where we learn that the speaker has come to scatter a loved-one’s ashes: “…I find / it’s easier to release you, as I must, / less harrowing by far, / knowing that all human dust / was once a star.” How do we live through loss? The Book of Common Prayer, with its “dust to dust,” assures us that our senses get it wrong when we see mortal remains as mere elemental dust; science, teaching us that all elements had their origins in the fires of supernovas, assures us that there is nothing “mere” about dust. Either way, our consolation – dare we say our salvation? — comes in our ability to see more than motes.

A big part of a writer’s inner life is, of course, literature. It is no surprise to find that the meaning Chandler finds in the world is informed in part by her wide reading, just as there’s no doubt that her own poetry will become part of many readers’ inner lives. The epigraph to “Journey” comes from Robert Frost’s “Hyla Brook,” a poem about how memory conditions our view of what we care deeply about: “We love the things we love for what they are.” What they are, inevitably, is a palimpsest, one impression written over another and over yet another – the sum of our experience of them.

“New Hampshire Interval” pays explicit homage to Frost. At the farm to which Frost returned after his desperate (and successful) quest for recognition in England, Chandler sees the tangible objects, “his Morris chair,” “the woodstove,” “the frosted trees” he tapped for maple sugar (delightful trope, that “frosted"), and she sees them all transformed by her knowledge of Frost’s life and work, hears him “speaking to God about the world’s despair.” Just as Frost himself wrote meaning into the landscape, Chandler writes another page of her own, and for us.

“Vermont Passage” also transforms a landscape, describing the profuse flowers of summer that linger in memory after summer gives way to cold: “I breathe in honeyed memories of clover, / and winter, for a while at least, is over.” We live in two worlds, or many worlds: the literal “bitter night” of winter, along with our memory of what was, which is also our expectation of what will be. Chandler gives texture to the flat world. If there’s any truth to the cliché that poetry reminds us to stop and smell the roses, Chandler’s poetry reminds us that we can also revel in the smells and sights that linger in our recollection. It is the remembered roses we smell most poignantly.

“Lines of Flight” ranges far and deeply. The poems display a craft that is all the more impressive for the way it never distracts us from the scene but, rather, adds a dimension of music and, yes, memorable texture.


Catherine Chandler, an American poet born in New York City and raised in Pennsylvania, completed her graduate studies at McGill University in Montreal, where she has lectured in the Department of Languages and Translation for many years. She is the winner of the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award. Her poems, interviews, essays and English translations from French and Spanish have been published in numerous journals and anthologies in the USA, the UK, Canada and Australia.




Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Shortlisted !

Announced today: My online mini-collection, "Coming to Terms", (ten poems in ten different forms) has been shortlisted for the ATYYS award (competitor category). A judging panel has sent all finalists' work to the final contest judge, Margaret Atwood.

There were 3,730 entries (of ten poems each) in the competitor category.

Wish me luck !


Friday, December 7, 2012

All Said and Done (ASD)



I'm thrilled to have been approached by David Sollis, editor of All Said and Done, a wonderful anthology of light poetry, to contribute my poem "Take Off" (page 67). I'm in the company of stellar poets such as John Whitworth, Julie Kane and Wendy Cope, to name only a few.

Proceeds to the National Autistic Society. You can buy it on Amazon for a little over $13.00 (paperback) or the Kindle edition for $7.00. If you're a member of Amazon Prime you can read it for free.

Published only last week, it is already #18 on the Amazon (UK) best seller's list for poetry anthologies (#45 in the US).

Read more about ASD by clicking here.

Why not put it on your Christmas list?

 

 

Book Description

December 2, 2012
 
This unique anthology contains a smörgåsbord of the best in light verse and will have you laughing out loud, or at the very least, raise a wry smile. Throughout the book there are also some more poignant and thought provoking pieces. The poems have been chosen to provide a snapshot of modern life and cover topics we're all familiar with (e.g. Relationships, Communication and Empathy). It is no coincidence that these themes encompass some of the main areas of difficulty for autistic individuals.

Contributions from: Alanna Blake, Andy White, Anna Evans, Attila The Stockbroker, Bill Greenwell, Brendan Beary, Catherine Chandler, Charles Ghigna, D A Prince, David Axton, David Hedges, Dave Spicer, Dean Parkin, Diane Zoller-Ciatto, Donna Williams, Gillian Ewing, Helena Nelson, Joanne Neill, John Whitworth, Julie Kane, Kate Gladstone, Laura Ledbetter, Mae Scanlan, Martin Parker, Matty Angel, Melinda Smith, Murray Lachlan Young, Nicole Nicholson, Patrick Winstanley, Peter Goulding, Rick Lupert, Scott Emmons, Steve Morris, Susan McLean, Wendy Cope & Wendy Lawson.


Attila The Stockbroker ??????  Yep.







Sunday, December 2, 2012

Winterbourne



Winterbourne
 by Catherine Chandler

December at this latitude is stark,
the woods a snarl of black and brown and gray.
By five o’clock the west’s already dark.
On the sandpit pond, now set along its edges,
straggling greylags land then hie away
while redpolls huddle deeper in the hedges.
Whitetail forage in the field and browse
on brittle forbs untouched by moldboard plows.

Then every year, around this time, a stream
loosens from the underlime of summer’s
stranglehold. And when the morning steam
dissipates above the flinty bed
like idle gossip or unfounded rumors,
a song arising from its fountainhead
trips over still, impenetrable stones
into my house, my heart, my blood, my bones.

It babbles things which in July lie laden
with sunny dispositions; things that cry
out from lengthened shadows; things forbidden;
of many-splendored things; of things that wilt,
weep, bleed and ultimately die.
And though the rivulet retreats to silt
come spring, it sings me all I need to know,
flanked though I be by behemoths of snow.