The sonnets in This Sweet Order sit at the confluence of music, intellect, and philosophy. Some sonnet-writers are content to fill in the pentameter like a puzzle where form trumps meaning. For Catherine Chandler, word and idiom are primary; she bends the form into the service of the content. The poem announces itself as a sonnet only insofar as its structure (quatrain, octave, sestet, couplet) is integral to the idea. The subject might be a flower, a highway, a season, or a loss: expect wisdom; expect plenty of wit: expect surprises. If poems like 'Matryoshka' and 'Sonnet Love' are easy on the ear, above all they delight the mind. Chandler is a philosopher: 'Assembly', 'She', and 'Mother's Day' (for example) articulate thoughts with such immediacy that I almost feel as if I'm inside the poem. These are not poems that let you get away with just reading them. They bring you right into the conversation. ~ Deborah Warren

This Sweet Order

Literature & Fiction

Chandler, Catherine

Poetry

White Violet Press

Poetry. 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. "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 Wilbur.

Lines of Flight

Able Muse Press

Catherine Chandler's poetic history reminds us that we are the sum of our ancestors' tales, known and unknown. She has brilliantly captured the essence of the old Connecticut Yankee settlers through the eyes of Rachel, Diah and Wilmot Munson, bringing light to the stories that were once dark. -Anthony T.P. Brooks, Director and Curator, Wilkes-Barré Preservation Society Catherine Chandler has undertaken in-depth research into America's early pioneers as well as her own family history to create a vivid and detailed account of life on the frontier. Reaching beyond facts and dates, this story helps to humanize and memorialize the long-ago people and events that ultimately formed the country we know today. -Mark G. Dziak, Author, The Battle of Wyoming: For Liberty and Life Annals of the Dear Unknown is a beautifully written and thought-provoking look at the lives of Diah Munson, his wife Rachel Tyler Munson, and their children. It is a story of perseverance and the will to survive. Catherine's words weave a tapestry of the early American pioneering spirit, taking us for a walk in the footsteps of her Munson forebears as they face new beginnings, challenges, and adventures setting down roots in the Pennsylvania wilderness. -Catherine McNulty Bell, Historian, Thomas Munson Foundation Catherine Chandler's Annals of the Dear Unknown reveals a brutal and forgotten tale: the destruction of Pennsylvania's Wyoming Valley during the eighteenth century. The book is a considerable achievement in the writing of poetry, history, and anthropology. -James Najarian, Author, The Goat Songs In Annals of the Dear Unknown, Catherine Chandler combines historical insight and poetic imagination to create a verse narrative that traces the lives of her distant pioneer ancestors. This chronicle, rich in detail and characters, resurrects a personal family history, and in doing so reminds us, as an old Russian proverb says, "You live as long as you are remembered." -Richard Meyer, Author, Orbital Paths

Annals of the Dear Unknown: A verse-tale

Kelsay Books

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

Pointing Home

Literary

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Chandler, Catherine. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Chandler, Catherine

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Chandler, Catherine. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

This Sweet Order

Lines of Flight

Annals of the Dear Unknown: A verse-tale

Pointing Home