Richard Wilbur Award-winning Book: Preview 2

Preparing the exhumation of the remains of Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda

Looks like The Frangible Hour should be available by December 6. Will keep you updated. Below is a second preview poem,  "Exhuming Neruda". Pablo Neruda's (1904-1973) real name was Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto.

Exhuming Neruda

Poet’s story becomes a murder mystery: Chile exhumes Pablo Neruda’s remains (CNN Headline, April 10, 2013)

At Isla Negra, Neftalí, you sang of joy and pain,

of poverty, Matilde, birds, of artichokes and rain.

And once at Isla Negra, they searched each corner of

your hideaway, but all they found was bread and wine and love.

And now at Isla Negra, they are digging up your bones;

they’ll fly them to the capital then rearrange the stones.

At Isla Negra, Neftalí, far from the abattoirs,

a leaf drifts to the earth amid the keen of grass and stars.


 -- Catherine Chandler

View of the sea from Pablo Neruda's home on Isla Negra

Richard Wilbur Award-winning Book: Preview 1

My new book, The Frangible Hour, winner of the 2016 Richard Wilbur Award, will be out later this month. With that in mind, I'm going to publish a few of my favorite poems from that collection here on The Wonderful Boat over the next few days.

"What You Kept" is based on a very bittersweet experience, the clearing out of my parents' home after their deaths, my mother in 2011 and my father in 2012.

The poem is addressed to my mother, and is the fourth poem in the long poem in The Frangible Hour entitled "Four Songs of Parting". The poem was also a finalist for the Able Muse Write Prize, as part of a two-part elegy, "Discovery".

I hope you'll consider purchasing The Frangible Hour once it becomes available. I'll let you all know as soon as I do!

What You Kept

A mildewed trunk defending old receipts,

a cookie tin,

discolored carpets, pillowcases, sheets.

Easy enough, as are the Mason jars—

stuff for the trash or the recycling bin,

the church bazaars.

I toss aside what’s always needled me—

the plaque from John Paul’s Holy Jubilee,

the Norman Rockwell mugs, the Kinkade prints.

From underneath

a roll of batting and a bolt of chintz

I pull a faded ribbon-festooned box.

Inside, my fairy-stolen baby teeth

and first-shorn locks

acknowledge, in an elegant goodbye,  

that I was once the apple of your eye.

 -- Catherine Chandler

******************************************

November

November Dawn, Saint-Lazare, Québec. Photo by Catherine Chandler

November

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, remnant of the year, is 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. 

(by Catherine Chandler. First published in Measure, Volume VIII, Issue 1, 2013)