REVIEWS & INTERVIEWS
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My Books (click on the link below)
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LIST OF MY POEMS AND SHORT STORIES
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BIO
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AWARDS
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Wednesday, April 26, 2017
The Rotary Dial
Some good news!
My curtal sonnet, Plain Beauty, has been accepted for publication in the Canada-based online poetry journal, The Rotary Dial.
Thanks to editors Pino and Alexandra.
Sunday, April 23, 2017
National Poetry Registry of Canada
I'm happy to announce that three of my poems, "Full Snow Moon," "Superbia," and "The Lost Villages: Inundation Day," have been chosen by George Elliott Clarke, Poet Laureate of Canada, for inclusion in the National Poetry Registry, Library of Parliament.
All three poems are in my second book, "Glad and Sorry Seasons," published by Biblioasis in Windsor, Ontario in 2014.
Thursday, April 6, 2017
Alabama Literary Review
Three of my poems, "Memento", "Lessons at Fall Kill Creek", and "The Woodlot" are now online HERE. Volume 25, No. 1 (2016). On pages 25, 26 and 27.
Many thanks to editor, William Thompson.
Sunday, April 2, 2017
"From the beautiful to the brittle": The Frangible Hour
An excerpt from Rebekah Martindale’s review, “Inside the Garden Gate” for Think Journal.
Thank you, Rebekah, and editor Susan Spear.
Catherine
Chandler’s The Frangible Hour captures moments in time
from the beautiful to the brittle.
The
book’s opening sonnet begins with a moment of intense personal experience, the
instant when beauty is recognized as “an unendurable embrace.” Reminders of
beauty’s fragility cover the temporal spectrum—Seconds: the moment of awe,
Minutes: the fleeting “quiddity of daybreak,” Days: the “yellow-green” of the
leaves, Weeks: the “garden plot of rhubarb and asparagus,” Months: the summer
itself whose demise is imminent, Years: the child, who is transformed into
adulthood as the poem proceeds. Then finally, Hours, in the closing couplet as
the woman returns to the garden gate, “stockings wet with dew” and delays her housework
for “an hour or two.”
Chandler evokes the Koine Greek pathos of beauty,
hōraios, which associates beauty with “being of one’s hour,” which is not
forever. References to time—hours, days, weeks, seasons—measure the poems in
Part I and reappear frequently. Chandler
also evokes the
liturgical calendar as she moves through the “Lenten brume,” of “Wherein the
Snow is Hid” to images of Easter morning in “Zeeman’s Paradox.” Her poem,
“Chasubles,” links the liturgical with the temporal.
Roots
suck down the spectrum’s red
to
steel a brutal crust;
leaves
must take what’s left of light—
epitome
of trust.
Summer’s
a smiling charlatan
camouflaged
in green
where
violet truths lie mantled in
the
seen and unseen.
The
seven elegies that make up Part II, subtitled “Days of Grass,” are reflections
on Psalm 103:15-16: “As for man, his days are like grass, he flourishes like a
flower of the field; the wind blows over it and it is gone, and its place
remembers it no more.”
The
first five poems are dedicated to specific people (and a dog). The last two
poems, which are more general meditations on death are in lighter verse forms.
These bouncy rhythms not only give the poems an eerie tinge, but also quicken
the pace, creating a nice transition into Part III: from the poem “Heal-all”:
Bring
me a barn loft of heal-all
and
up with my heartbreak I’ll climb.
I
won’t drink it or eat it
because,
though I need it,
my
wounds want the heal-all of time.
Part
III continues with short, often witty, poems celebrating great and small
moments. It presses on us references to time, such as “summer,” “spring,” “winter,” “lifespan,”
“point,” “day,” “month,” “year.”
The
humorous sonnet, “Olēka,” in which the narrator is confronted with the unused
spices in her double-decker spice rack ends Part III on an ironic note: the
awareness of how few days are memorable.
Part
IV brings us moments of regret, recognition, and despair. Again, it is the
reminder of hōraios that give the poems poignancy and cohesiveness. Both beauty
and brittleness are captured in the slant rhyme Christmastime sonnet, “For
Melina, 8, Sleeping.” Here it is the unsaid word lurking just below the surface
that threatens the sleeping girl, but it also invites the reader to recognize
the hōraios in her.
Soon
enough some callous, hard-nosed kid
at
school will razz you for your artless faith,
and
blab the truth you sense behind the myth.
I
wish you sugarplums, as my unsaid
revelation
like an axiom,
swirls
above the silence. Does no harm.
Part
V, the final section of the book, consists of meditations on death and grief.
The harrowing five-part poem “Almost” documents the near death of the author’s
daughter. Now time is measured in novenas and decades counted on her comatose
daughter’s hands. Chandler
ends with an elegy to her father, closing her book with prayerful couplets.
These final couplets rise up as concrete formations of a spiritual honesty that
has infused the book all along:
A
birth. A life. A death. A promise barely kept—
these
tenuous words of denouement: a song of praise.
She
deals in tar & tallow, turpentine & twine,
lifts
one last chantey to the dawn—in song, she prays.
"The metaphysical within the physical": The Frangible Hour
New Review by Janet McCann for the print journal, Presence. Thank you, Janet and also editor, Mary Ann Miller.
The Frangible Hour, Poems, by Catherine
Chandler (The University
of Evansville Press,
2016)
The
Frangible Hour
is a delight to read, especially for those who appreciate formal poetry. The book seems an especially appropriate
choice for the Richard Wilbur Prize, as the poet, like Wilbur, is a master of
forms, and the poems are infused with a metaphysics that makes of the natural
world a luminous place. Not that the
poems are always upbeat, but the spiritual dimension is always present.
Catherine Marie Chandler was born in New York City and raised in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.
She holds a Master of Arts from McGill
University. Chandler has lectured at
McGill for many years and also held the post of International Affairs
Officer. Her previous books include Lines of Flight, This Sweet Order, and Glad
and Sorry Seasons; this new collection, The
Frangible Hour, is the winner of the 2016 Richard Wilbur Award.
The poems offer us a full palette of
forms, and it is fun to recognize them all, the sonnets, pantoums, ballads,
ghazals, rimas dissolutas, triolets, and so forth. But her use of form is flexible and not
intrusive. Form does not bully sense
into compliance, but rather creates a barely heard melody behind the meditation
or observation. She uses pleasing
off-rhymes and the rhythms are never metronome-like. When forms have both loose and tight
definitions, she uses the looser one—the ghazal for instance for purists has a
lot of rules, but she follows only the more basic ones. The music forms a counterpoint to the
expected grammatical flow of the sentence. There is a wry humor in some of the
poems and this too fits the patterns she chooses.
Science and math inform the poems,
noticeable even in the titles. Footnotes at the end fill in some of the
complicated bits, but happily the reader does not need them to intuitively
grasp the poem. In fact, the accessibility of the poems is part of their
appeal. One poem is described as “a
Fibonacci sonnet with ostensible mathematical references to the Argand Diagram
and Huygens’s Principle of Diffraction,” but we do not need this information to
appreciate the poem. There are words we may not know but their sense is usually
telegraphed by their content. The epigraphs are well-chosen, also, from the
Bible to Robert Frost to newscasts; they intrigue and direct. Sometimes they
refer to the incidents that generated the poetry, as in the short poem
“Exhuming Neruda,” which shows her command of metrics and her ironic wit.
“Poet’s story becomes a murder mystery: Chile exhumes
Pablo Neruda’s remains.”
--CNN headline, April 10, 2013
--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.
Chandler’s images create a
natural world that is frightening but must be seen in the context of
faith. The imagery in “Wherein the Snow
is Hid” to this reader recalls Sylvia Plath’s “Point Shirley,” as the picture
and rhythms seem to echo the Plath poem. The poem begins
along
potholed ruelles, plowed rough and high,
lie
last December’s snows
with
jagged firn from months when I,
in numb
goodnight,
have
curled up in the company of crows.
Nature is bleak and threatening, offering the
chance of eternal winter. The speaker concludes,
though, that
…I know
the pond will bloom,
The
wild geese will return. They always do.
And so
it is I cope
with
winter. For although it’s true
one’s
fear of God
At
times might rule out razor, river, rope,
hope
holds me here, ludicrous and odd,
valuing
March above
July’s
colossal verdant fraud,
because
a mass
of
freeze-thaw scree bears witness to a love
that
once approached the melting point of glass.
Indeed the poem seems to answer Plath’s,
whether intentionally or not—the passage of time and seasons does not prove the
meaninglessness of the individual life, as in Plath’s poem, but in a strange
way affirms it.
The book is divided into five
sections, and includes poems about
nature, faith, the inhabitants of a small town, plants and herbs, glimpses of a
Catholic childhood, loss of a father, and near-loss of a daughter—especially
persuasive are those about her daughter’s near death from an aneurysm.
In this collection, form and meaning
are so welded that the rhythms still repeat after the reader has closed the
book, keeping their message in memory. The Frangible Hour is an inspiring book,
especially for those who seek the metaphysical within the physical.
Janet
McCann’s
work has been published in the Kansas
Quarterly, Parnassus, Nimrod, Sou’wester, America, Christian
Century, Christianity and Literature,
New York Quarterly, Tendril, and others. A 1989 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship
winner, she taught at Texas
A & M University
from 1969-2016, and is now Professor Emerita. She has co-edited anthologies
with David Craig, Odd Angles of Heaven
(Shaw, 1994), Place of Passage (Story
Line, 2000), and Poems of Francis and
Clare (St. Anthony Messenger, 2004). Most recent poetry collection: The Crone at the Casino (Lamar
University Press, 2014).