Before we continue with Part Two, I reprint below the short introduction to Annals of the Dear Unknown, by George Elliott Clarke, 7th Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada, author of Where Beauty Survived: An Africadian Memoir (Knopf, 2021)
Raised in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, poet Catherine Chandler
spelunks into, excavates, and recovers her Euro-American-settler
genealogy, while examining the U.S. Revolutionary War and
its disruptions of agricultural endeavour and frontier households,
noting the economics of trade with Indigenous peoples and
their sometimes violent disaffection with the offerings of settler-interlopers.
In Annals of the Dear Unknown, Chandler recognizes that
“Uncertainty and ambiguity / must either be rejected or embraced, /
leaving room for mystery and truths / more beautiful for having been imagined.”
The Richard Wilbur Award-winning bard presents her narrative
verse in basically decasyllabic lines in trios of ten-line stanzas.
Americans will hear Wilbur, here, but also Longfellow
(Evangeline), while Canadian readers may be reminded of E.J. Pratt
(Brébeuf and His Brethren). Whatever the echoes that one may
recognize, this verse saga is original, rich with true incident, and
even a kind of chronological preface to William Carlos Williams’ Paterson.
Enjoy here and now these Annals of the Dear Unknown.
—George Elliott Clarke, 7th Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada
Author, Where Beauty Survived: An Africadian Memoir (Knopf, 2021)
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