Delmira Agustini

Catherine Chandler, at the crossroads of Delmira Agustini and Cálices Vacíos (one of her books), Punta del Este, Uruguay, February 2013. Photo by Hugo Oliveira

I'm pleased to announce that I've been invited to write a second essay for the Mezzo Cammin Women Poets Timeline Project. I've accepted, and have already begun my research on another Uruguayan poet, Delmira Agustini. Agustini was a personal friend of María Eugenia Vaz Ferreira, the subject of my first essay.

This poetry blog is named for one of Agustini's poems, "La barca milagrosa" (my English translation on a separate page).

I'm hoping to finish it in time for the 2014 West Chester Poetry Conference, celebrating its 20th anniversary.

One of my favorite poems by Philip Larkin

Home is so Sad

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft

And turn again to what it started as, 
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.

13 December 1958. From The Whitsun Weddings
© The Estate of Philip Larkin

Class Reunion

Catherine Marie Chandler, High School graduation photo

I'm honored to have been asked to write a poem for the reunion of the James M. Coughlin High School Class of 1968, to be held later this month.

Forty-five years ago I wrote the words to the class song, Love is Blue. My audio recording of the poem, a sonnet entitled "Chiaroscuro", will be played prior to the reading of the list of our deceased classmates. 

Thank you, Beth Roche Ward, for this kind invitation to participate, although I will not be there in person.

♥ Cathy

Missing you . . .

My beautiful mother, Bernice Alice Smith Chandler

 July 10, 1930 - July 10, 2011

The distance that the dead have gone
Does not at first appear --
Their coming back seems possible
For many an ardent year.

And then, that we have followed them,
We more than half suspect,
So intimate have we become
With their dear retrospect.

 

 

(Emily Dickinson, Poem No. 1741, 1896)

♥ Cathy

The Rotary Dial

Barnsley fern plotted with VisSim (Source: Wikipedia)

A recent poem of mine, Horizons, is now online at The Rotary Dial, page 10. (Password: ektoplazm)