Bøger af Catherine Chandler

Catherine Chandler's Pointing Home offers a poignant look back at worlds too rich, and richly painful, to be forgotten. At its center stands the marvelous sonnet sequence "Madison Street" which remembers and restores the vibrant yet troubled community of a Pennsylvania neighborhood caught and transformed by time. Through characters as quirkily authentic as those who populate Spoon River, Chandler traces the entangled lives of "Boomers from a lost millennium" through love, sorrow, and tragedy, her narrative compass as unfailing as her metrical facility. Elsewhere, Chandler looks toward the broader world beyond-a world where families cross the Canadian border under cover of night, and the gunfire of Sandy Hook recalls the names of children whose duck-and-cover drills reflect the fears that define an era. Chandler's multilayered translations of Uruguayan poets, her acute ekphrastic sequence on paintings by Edward Hopper, and her elegy for poet Timothy Murphy are but a few of the treasures in a book notable for its formal command, deep empathy, and leavening wit. Again and again, Chandler proves herself a master who deftly "parses the wild syllable of why." -Ned Balbo, winner of the Poets' Prize, the Richard Wilbur Award, the Donald Justice Poetry Prize and the New Criterion Poetry Prize

Lines of Flight is the first full-length collection from Catherine Chandler, an acclaimed American poet of quiet elegance whose simple style belies the range and depth of her poems. She is equally at ease with poems of nature as with those of people, relationships, landscapes and realms¿the domestic, the foreign, even those scanning the vast unknown of space or the esoterica of science. These poems, carefully crafted with formal dexterity in contemporary idiom, are deployed with precision in a showcase of forms such as the villanelle, sapphic, ballad, pantoum, triolet, nonce, and the sonnet¿Chandler's specialty, for which she won the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award. PRAISE FOR LINES OF FLIGHT: Catherine Chandler's poems¿I think particularly of the sonnet "Vermont Passage"¿offer the reader a plain eloquence, a keen eye, and a graceful development of thought. Elsewhere in this fine book, she puts her gifts at the service of wit, as in the little anti-poetic poem "Supernova." Lines of Flight is altogether a lively performance. ¿ Richard WilburOne of the things that poetry¿when it's very good¿does better than anything else is to suggest conflicting things at the same time and confront the reader with the possibility that both may be true. This book, which is extraordinarily good, does that to perfection. ¿ Rhina P. Espaillat (from the "Foreword")Catherine Chandler's Lines of Flight is a marvelously accomplished first collection. Even to call it a 'first collection' seems somehow misleading; it is a first collection as Housman's A Shropshire Lad was. These are poems that have been long meditated and patiently crafted; they are distillations of experience captured in exquisite measures. There seems to be no form of which Catherine Chandler is not a master, from quatrains and Sapphics to ballads and pantoums. She is an especially brilliant sonneteer. Her formal artistry is not on display for its own sake but is employed with often lacerating effect to probe "the hush/of who I am." These are poems steeped in the sorrows of lucidity. At the same time, she has a subtle eye for landscapes and foreign vistas, from Ushuaia to (even more exotic) Poughkeepsie. As she puts it, "Some things she loves for where they are." Her poems on natural things, particularly those on birds, are alive with the rush of wings. For, though she modestly denies it, she is a poet who can "explicate the texture of the air." Poem after poem offers what she calls "fugitive vignettes" and yet, despite her ironic title, there's nothing fugitive about her verse. These beautiful poems have been made to last. ¿ Eric OrmsbyIn Lines of Flight, we hear an engaging and authoritative new voice. Catherine Chandler displays a dazzling command of poetic forms, writing skillfully in the sonnet, ballad stanza, rondel, villanelle, cento, tercets¿but to enjoy her work, the reader doesn't have to be a fan of form. A keen observer of the natural world, she can also capture human life in all its harsh crudity (see "Boots" or "To the Man on Mansfield Street"). She writes with drive and force, and yet is able to convey what she calls "the delicate forensics of the heart." Her instrument has many strings. She looks to me like a poet of major promise. ¿ X.J. KennedyABOUT THE AUTHOR: Catherine Chandler, an American poet born in New York City and raised in Pennsylvania, completed her graduate studies at McGill Uni

The winner of the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award explores the extremes of joy and sorrow in a formally diverse collection.