A new review of Glad and Sorry Seasons by Siham Karami
Glad and Sorry Seasons
By Catherine Chandler
Biblioasis
$18.95
Before reading Catherine Chandler’s latest poetry collection,
Glad and Sorry Seasons,
I was already familiar with several of the poems in it, and felt I
knew, to some extent, what to expect: fine, smooth, well-crafted
“formalist” poems. And here we find a wide range of forms, in particular
the sonnet, her home turf. But what I discovered in this book
transcends this sort of categorization. Or maybe redefines it.
The title (from Shakespeare’s sonnet 19) tells us this is about
seasons: the seasons of emotion and the passage of time. She explores
this subject from the inside, the places of raw emotion, tamed by the
sonics of formal poetry. Although metrical and rhyming poetry in English
seems like a far cry from haiku, this
interview
in Rattle with Richard Gilbert on the subject of haiku gave me a number
of interesting parallels showing the universality of form in poetry. I
would assert that form is part of the essence of poetry, and the
author’s mastery of the forms she uses is essential to how well they
work.
Seasons, as Gilbert describes, have their own language in Japanese haiku, with whole dictionaries devoted to “season words” or
kigo that “go back for centuries, which is really the vertical depth that makes kigo powerful.” In this sense,
kigo may be analogous to literary allusions, a language connecting poetry to its own history.
Another dimension to
kigo is that each one refers to a whole set of associations, an “environment.” “Moon” isn’t just the moon, for example.
In Japanese, when we say “moon” in haiku, it’s always the
moon-viewing moon… there’s also a sense of impermanent beauty…in the
early autumn…a quietly festive time sharing a sense of heart—that’s all
included in the kigo.
This sense of a word representing many things is analogous to
idiomatic expressions and even clichés, in the sense of common,
frequently-used expressions. Chandler uses these types of words, in the
tradition of Frost, to evoke a larger
feeling with a few words.
For example, in her poem “November,” common expressions are used in
unusual combinations to create a confluence of associations.
November is a season all its own—
a month of saints and souls and soldiers. Snow
will soon white out a fallacy of brown.
It is a month of waiting, lying low.
November is a season all its own—
a time for turning back the clock as though
it’s useless to pretend. A dressing-down.
Thin ice entices me to touch and go.
November’s neither here nor there, but here
in dazzling dawns that dissipate to grey;
here in the tilting asymmetric branch
and sharp note of a towering white pine where
the pik and churlee of a purple finch
can either break a heart or make a day.
She’s painted a strongly familiar picture of November: “a season all
its own” works like a picture frame. Familiar expressions such as “lying
low,” “turning back the clock,” “a dressing-down,” “touch and go,” and
“neither here nor there” combine their associative power in unusual
ways, to create a striking cadence of emotion. None of these words are
the way we think of November. Yet the effect is strangely apt for how we
feel about it. The poem takes on layers of new meaning, tinged
with foreboding, cut to the possibility of uplift at the end, as if to
say “at this point it’s in
your hands.” We’re left with the image of the lovely birdsong, which will be what we make of it.
Of course, the dynamic of haiku is entirely different, image-focused,
but this quote proposes a greater similarity than we’d think:
Linguistically, these languages, English and Japanese, do
not meet at all on the level of the syllable; they meet on the level of
the metrical phrase.
(Italics mine.)
So there is a universal element between such disparate forms as, say,
the sonnet and haiku. Chandler writes with an uncanny ear for that
“metrical phrase,” in its rhythm and rhyme.
One more major and relevant haiku concept is
kire or
“cutting,” referring to how “the haiku has to be cut in space and time
in some way, [which]… has an emotional charge.” This “creates these two
broken parts that don’t go together.” And that is like the “turn” of the
sonnet, or indeed any good poem, transforming one situation or thing
into an entirely different one, “cutting” us out of time and place and
seeing something unexpected in a new way. Chandler works in rhyme and
meter, almost exclusively. But she “cuts” with exceptional subtlety.
To see how Chandler incorporates both concepts into her poetry, read this poem in an unusual form:
Rush Hour Sonondilla
I celebrate the great sardine,
and count the ways I love it: dried,
in cans, smoked, salted, deep-fat fried,
filleted in soup and fish terrine.
I love it’s pre-cooked beauties, too—
its sleek and shiny silver skin,
its single tiny dorsal fin—
before it hits the barbecue.
Young herring, swimming in the sea,
awash in your Omega-3,
soon you shall pay a hefty price
and end up on a bed of rice.
For now, take heart in that you’re free,
not packed inside this train, like me.
We are told that it’s rush hour by the title. Then swiftly taken into
an ode to the sardine with subtle humor. “I celebrate the great…”
implies a grand speech, then “cuts” into the unexpected image of a
sardine. Like a master illusionist, she draw us into “I count the ways”
from a Shakespearean sonnet everyone knows, then into a list of methods
of food preparation. The final stanza is so comic and improbable that we
forget the title until the last line suddenly “cuts” us back. To what? A
cliché! Nice. This shows the use of words with strong common
associations to take us out of a place and then plop us back in with
everything changed, like a punchline. Oh, and another name for the form
“Sonondilla” is “The Sardine.” Another little cutaway for the lucky nerd
who reads footnotes, like me.
In a sonnet, I believe the prelude to the turn is of equal
importance. Skillful placement of words and the creation of sonics and
rhythm is what “floats” the reader in one environment before suddenly
being “cut” into another.
The first part establishes a normalcy of action in which there’s an
element of expectation but also of convention—hence the “convention” of
forms, the sonnet in particular. This idea dovetails perfectly into
Chandler’s sonnet to the Sonnet, “Sonnet Love.”
I love the way its rhythms and its rhymes
provide us with a promise, a belief
familiar voices at specific times
may modulate unmanageable grief.
I love the way we’re called to referee
the mind-heart matchup in its scanty ring;
how through it all our only guarantee
is that for fourteen rounds the ropes will sing.
I love the way it makes us feel at home,
the way it welcomes fugitives and fools
who have forgotten all roads lead to Rome
from shared beginnings in the tidal pools.
Life’s unpredictability defies
clean dénouement. I love the way it tries.
After a smooth, lilting progress through the poem, suddenly the final
sentence cuts into the middle of the last line, ending on the verb
“tries,” the only action we or the Sonnet can take to achieve
resolution. “It” has been set up in the poem to refer to the sonnet. Yet
despite the pronoun, we are led to feel it is
us. We are the
ones who try to create “clean dénouement.” And the verb “tries” hangs
there, as if searching for the verb “resolve” to make this a clean reply
to the “defies.” The “emotional charge” comes not from the repeated
word “love,” but from “tries.” It hangs, as we do, never actually
finished trying…
Her oft-quoted sonnet that shows how to “modulate” the “unmanageable
grief” of the loss of an unborn child, Nemerov prize-winning “Coming to
Terms,” takes the reader through the “after” scene in all its emptiness
and attempts at resolution to “the artful look of ordinary days,” a
powerful phrase that captures how we try, through the art of what must
ultimately be a sort of deception, to create continuity in a life that
cuts us to the heart, a life that must end. Her poems cut to her own
heart to give us the art of resolution in ours.
Her subject matter traverses the emotional “glad and sorry seasons”
of aging, loss, illness, both on an individual or mass scale, suicide,
the need for love or companionship, the “seven deadly sins” (with modern
applications) and, subtly included, the need for God. These days God
is discreetly left out of all public discourse, replaced by “nature.”
Chandler bucks the trend, her faith and doubts honestly expressed. The
poem “When” uses a list poem to gently remind us, in a few strongly
associative words, of something higher.
A review of this book wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the
translations of French Canadian and Latin American poets, one of whose
moving poems, “The Wonderful Boat,” is the title of her
blog.
These are languages Chandler has lived in; she is Canadian and spends
much of her time in South America. Even so, I can hardly imagine how she
managed to create such elegant, perfectly rhymed metrical poems
in translation. Translation
has been described
by J.G. McClure as a kind of ekphrasis: “to celebrate the new artistic
possibilities of the conversation between two writers.” It helps that
her love of these writers shows through in the work. And judging by the
final poem (her own) of the book, “Edward Hopper’s Automat,” which has a
Hitchcock or Rod Serling cinematic quality and conclusion (think
“cut!”), ekphrasis is one of Chandler’s strong suits.
In fact, “formalist” may be a redundant moniker: all poetry is by
definition “formal,” but in different ways. “Free verse” employs line
breaks. Even prose poetry, as well as free verse, uses the haiku
characteristics of specialized associative language, cutting, and a
sonic relationship with the language. In short, one can judge all poetry
by these criteria, and the rest is a matter of style and taste.
In this larger sense, Chandler succeeds not merely as a writer of
poetry in traditional forms and metrics, but of poetry that works to
create an “emotional charge” in the reader. Poetry satisfies in ways
prose can’t. Done here by one of the best.
