Pointing Home

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