Excerpt
from Rebekah Martindale’s review, “Inside the Garden Gate” for Think Journal (Western State Colorado University)
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.
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