ANNALS OF THE DEAR UNKNOWN: INTRODUCTION BY GEORGE ELLIOTT CLARKE

 

 

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)

NOTE: The title of the book, Annals of the Dear Unknown, comes from Thomas Campbell’s poem, Gertrude of Wyoming; A Pennsylvanian Tale where, in one part, Gertrude is musing about her ancestors in Scotland, whom she had never met:

 

The sunrise drew her thoughts to Europe forth,
That thus apostrophized its viewless scene;
"Land of my father's love, my mother's birth!
The home of kindred I have never seen!
We know not other — oceans are between;—
Yet say! far friendly hearts from whence we came,
Of us does oft remembrance intervene?
My mother sure — my sire a thought may claim;—
But Gertrude is to you an unregarded name.

"And yet, lov'd England! when thy name I trace
In many a pilgrim's tale and poet's song,
How can I choose but wish for one embrace
Of them, the dear unknown, to whom belong
My mother's looks, — perhaps her likeness strong?