Sherry Chandler

What is redeemed by life?

David Harrity’s Finishing Line chapbook, Morning & What Has Come Since (2007), contains a jewel of a sonnet “Hail Mary in the Courtyard,” which seem to me to cut to the heart of Harrity’s work here. Standing before the statue, the speaker asks:

. . . I wonder if your words
fall like marbles from the pocket of some
boy, roll into the burnt grass, never found.

This sonnet follows a long, multi-part poem entitled “Prayers for the City” which begins

This place is a blanket of sound.
How can we pray? How can we pray?

and ends

City you are loved,
      city, you are loved,
             city, you are loved
                        so I lift my voice
                                  to keep asking what you cannot.

Harrity’s poems wrestle with faith in a way that harks back, not to Donne — whose work really seems to me to be all about Donne and how clever he can be — but to Herbert and Hopkins.

In “October Psalm”

I ask the words I cannot pray.
I ask again—what is redeemed
by my living?

Although I find the poems a little uneven — as what poets are not? — I invite you to keep an eye on Harrity and to take a look at this chapbook, which was nominated for a Pushcart and a Kentucky Literary Award.

“Like rain in a lost shoe”

The heart of Lesley Wheeler’s chapbook Scholarship Girl (Finishing Line, 2007) is a double crown of sonnets entitled “The Calderstones.”

According to Wikipedia, the Calderstones are six neolithic sandstone boulders that are thought to be the remains of a dolmen or megalithic tomb. The stones now stand in Calderstones Park, a 94-acre public park in Liverpool. The park was once a private estate that changed hands several times before it was purchased by the Liverpool Corporation in 1902. In the 19th century, the stone were thought to be part of a Druid’s circle, In 1825, a lead shot manufacturer named James Need Walker bought the estate. He moved the stones and made them part of the gateway to the estate. In 1954, they were placed inside a greenhouse to protect them from weathering.

The double crown, 14 sonnets linked last line to first, circles around these stones that should not be in a circle, “Six sandstone megaliths slouch in a ruddy ring,” the first line of the first sonnet and the last line of the last.

Wheeler uses these stones as am emblem for 1950s Liverpool, the world where her mother grew up, a world where

Merseyside is all mistakes and circles.
Its rumpled parks are cut from manor-lands sold
to a chain of merchants. The slave-trade triangle—

and its Calderstones

. . . Just look at the things:
they yearn to loom awesomely, but cows
have chafed their shabby hides on them, cascades
of soot have discolored them, and resting men
have traced their bootsoles there with worn-down blades.

Wheeler’s tale of the stones is a bit different from that told in Wikipedia:

. . . They lost their first site so lanes
could be widened. The mound itself was scooped
up as fertilizer. Liverpool shrugs and shrines
topple—are built again as a hobbyist’s quirk.
It was a mistake to arrange them in a circle.

It is difficult for those of us who grew up in the United States with tales of 1950s prosperity — even if Pat Nixon did wear a plain cloth coat — to understand the deprivation in England in the years after World War II. This is the world Wheeler seeks to bring alive to us, and to herself, a daughter whose “memories of her memories / are too reduced.” She is, as she explains in “Poem Without a Landscape.” a poet without a country, not of Virginia, not of New Jersey, but not of Liverpool either.

. . . The land is not my mother.
It minds its own business, and welcome to it.

And so she creates for us the world of her mother, the world of the “Scholarship Girl, 1953″

The scholarship girl paces to school
along broken sidewalks.
No one has cleaned the war up yet.

. . .

Caesar’s speeches will deflate
her one hot puff at a time
til she fits in anybody’s pocket:
the starchy white one of the Sister
who docs her bus fare
in fine for laddered stockings,
or mine, or even yours. Listen
for her nails scratching
against the fabric.

I love those lines for a chapbook, meant to be a book that could fit in a pocket. And so the scholarship girl is reduced to chapbook size. And yet she is larger than pocket-sized in these poems.

The Calderstone sonnets are rhymed and metered, but they don’t exactly do the job of a traditional sonnet. They don’t serve argument, a problem and a resolution, but rather are recruited to serve narrative. They bring us a world where “summer is hungry and long,” a world of “two ounces of sugar, / the cup of orange juice on Fridays at the school,” where “the trembling crone who managed Calder High / did not want the scholarship girls.” They bring us the rag and bone man, the greengrocer with his blackmarket potatoes, the homeless petty-thieving aunt who is nevertheless a great source of comic stories and cream buns.

It is a world lost to Wheeler and yet it still lives in her, as she tells us in the final poem “Born, We Didden Know We Was”

. . . It’s gone
for everybody and I was never
there with my spiral pad or

a microphone, the resonance
just caught in me like rain
in a lost shoe, like grit in a pot
boiled often, rarely cleaned.

. . . But
I know something, a stain
that your rags cannot wipe

off the paper: this place-and-time
was noisy once, and has a sound
still. No elegies here.

The poems from Scholarship Girl will be incorporated into Lesley Wheeler’s collection, Heterotopia, selected by David Wojahn for the 2009 Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and to be out in the spring.

All my people

Marianne Worthington is a woman of diminutive stature but expansive spirit, especially when it comes to her Appalachian roots. In her Finishing Line chapbook Larger Bodies than Mine, she explores those roots. The dedication to “all my people” takes in her kin in their sorrow, their pain, their human failings.

Women seem compelled to write poems about their grandmothers. I have written a fair number of them myself. Such writing, such remembering, is a way of honoring legacy. But, because grandmother poems are so common, they are very difficult to write. In inexperienced hands, grandmother poems risk cliché and sentimentality. Sentimentality is not to be confused with sentiment. Skilled craftswomen may rely on sentiment, a strategy Annie Finch would champion, but the line is thin.

So sure is Worthington’s craft, so strong her intelligence, that her grandmother poems sing us a new song of an old relationship. Worthington is fearlessly honest and without a trace of sentimentality:

Reading My Grandmother’s Diary

I believe her faith was clichéd
built on evangelists’ tracts and radio
sermons, the words on the air dropping
like sharp pebbles, pitting her wrists
and ankles where she tied herself
to the bed each morning unable to rise.
her mind picking its way through

another bitter day.

Though sometimes her vision is gentler and does partake of sentiment:

Porcelain

I wash Grandmother’s Japanese china,
a pattern with such an old fashioned name:
Arlene.

“Porcelain” is one of three unrhymed sonnets in the chapbook. They are my favorites in this 29-page collection. Worthington might be deemed a semi-formal poet. She uses a loose sonnet form but most of her poems are free verse, long of line and boxy in shape but with a strong underlying rhythms. Worthington is a scholar of traditional mountain music, and her immersion in music has influenced her poetic line.

The central portion of the book is devoted to poems about Father, including my favorite of the sonnets:

For the Young Girl Who Lost Her Father

I would not give him back to you, your father
as a healthy man. He would change who you
became. Instead I wuld give back your summers . . .

It is always a mistake to conflate the poetic voice with the poet, and Worthington is at work at a series of dramatic monologues about women in the early years of country-music radio. So she is known to take on a persona. Still, there is a strong autobiographical feel to this chapbook, a feel of honoring the past by looking at it with clear eyes.

I think Jeff Daniel Marion got it right in his cover blurb:

Haunted by the past, the poems in Larger Bodies Than Mine are incantations, spells changed with the hope of striking a balance in a world of struggle and suffering. In the face of brokenness and shattered remnants of lives, the poems themselves redeem loss and long for wholeness. Here is a strong and steady voice worthy of our hearing.

Larger Bodies Than Mine was given the Appalachian Book of the Year award in poetry for 2007.

I’ll Fly Away

Dory L. Hudspeth and I have been crossing paths for several years now. Kentucky is a small state for poets I guess.

It was not, however, until we shared Preece cabin at the Appalachian Writers Workshop this summer that I felt I really got to know Dory. In late night talk-fests and early morning kaffe klatches, I found her to be like her poetry, a woman of grace and quiet substance.

“Wry and wise,” George Ella Lyon calls the poems in Dory’s Finishing Line chapbook I’ll Fly Away, and I’d call those the perfect words. George Ella also says these poems “catch your attention sideways,” and so they do. Written in a lean conversational blank verse, the poems often take a little twist at the end, a twist that changes everything.

The Way Things Fall

Cakes fall and become
small catastrophes
because of insufficient flour,
under baking,
too much sugar,
too much fat, or not enough baking powder.
Or they just fall
into a mild astonishment.
Insufficiencies and excesses
don’t explain how my life
came to happen this way.

Actually this little 44-word, 12-line poem turns twice. First to that astonishing “mild astonishment.” And then to a life that has somehow fallen. Does the astonishment carry forward then to the poem’s personna? I think it does. The cake and the speaker are mildly astonished that things have turned out this way.

Many of Dory’s poems are comic in this way, with a good dash of pepper to spice up the sweet.

But she is also capable of a heartbreakingly lovely nature poem, such as “Turning Parsley to Prayer” and “Heron Study”

he stands on one foot
then the other
neck bent
into a question mark
so still
so long
almost a landmark
expected to be
an always

The heron returns in the chapbook’s final poem, “Holding Your Own”

A sycamore can anchor
the whole sky,
and a single heron rivets
the bank to the current.

These poems delight — with their intelligence, their insight, their craft.

Where the Red Road Meets the Sky

Gail Chandler’s newly-released chapbook is called Where the Red Road Meets the Sky. It’s another beautiful Finishing Line edition, with heavy cream paper, a red ribbon and red endpapers. It’s a joy to behold.

Recently Gail took time to answer some questions for me about the chapbook and about her writing career.

SC: In the very first poem “Malawi”  [reprinted here on my blog], you are in “the warm heart of Africa” in conversation with a “small dusky man”

We talked of
Appalachian mountains
and Malawi hills.
Then he faded
into the shadows

After that introductory poem, I notice that you tend to interweave poems about Africa with those about your own Appalachian childhood.  Can you talk to me a little bit about the connection you see there?

GC: Oh, dear. This is an example of a poet thinking she is clear. Malawi people say their country is the warm heart of Africa. This poem takes place in Zambia, near Victoria Falls and the Zambezi River, where the Malawian and I are both strangers far from home.

My goal is to show parallels of life in different cultures, sort of a Family of Man in poetry, the red road being the universal life journey.

SC: All proceeds from the sale of Where the Red Road Meets the Sky go to support Vihiga Children�s Home in western Kenya. Could you tell us about the home?

GC: The home is in western Kenya, not far from where Obama’s father was born.  A retired Kenyan couple, Shem and Pricilla Agesa, wanted to give something back to their countryman. They began taking in children and holding classes.

My daughter, Tara, volunteered at a crucial time, just after the opening.  Mrs. Agesa named the school after Tara’s grandmother.  The students at Edith Junior School are now scoring the highest in the district although the teachers are the lowest paid.

About a hundred children live at the orphanage.  When I visited in 2003, the government had cut off all support and the kids were hungry.  My church, Thomas Jefferson Unitarian, agreed to arrange sponsorships for the children.  The Vihiga committee struggles to pay for feeding, housing and secondary school fees. Here is the link for the program: http://www.tjuc.org/joomla/index.php?option=com_content&task=section&id=8&Itemid=108

Meanwhile, I try to raise the money for the school’s payroll.

S.C.: In the poem “The Good People,: you speak first of attending a mission school where

A fat Dutch teacher prayed aloud
reminding us to be grateful
to those kind folks in Holland, Michigan
for providing us our mission school

And then of being just such a benefactor to the Kenyan school.

What is it like to progress from receiving charity to giving charity? What have you learned?

G.C.: Perhaps it is like looking in the mirror and seeing your mother.  I’ve learned some humility and gratitude, I hope.

S.C.: You have been in the Marine Corps and you have been a corrections officer in the Kentucky prison system, both roles associated with heavy machismo in popular culture. Could you talk a bit about what it was like to be a woman in these two roles?

G.C.: Actually, I was never a corrections officer.  I was looking for a job at the same time The Kentucky Department of Corrections was looking to put women in leadership rolls. They hired me as a Deputy Warden in a men’s prison, the first female in this position. A token woman.

I took my share of bruises like all fledgling bureaucrats. I am genetically an optimist so I pretended that it wasn’t a problem.  And mostly, it wasn’t.

S.C.: The military is a traditional way for Appalachian boys to get out of poverty and get an education. Was that your plan, too?

G.C.: My mother was a teacher, my father a public relations director and I enrolled in officer candidate school when I finished college at Berea. I had more options than many young people from the mountains but it was an expedient way out and I was ready to go.

S.C.: Your first book Sunflowers on Market Street grew out of your work with felons. What would you like to tell us about that book?

G.C.: I was the director of a Dismas Charities halfway house for adult male felons after I retired from the state. Part of the job was to write a human interest story each month. Dismas liked my vignettes and paid a very good editor to make the manuscript publishable. When I stopped working, I thought that as I had a book out, I ought to learn to write.

I would make changes now, but believe I succeeded in showing that inmates are as different from each other as are the rest of us. I am grateful to Dismas for the opportunities Sunflowers on Market Street has given me.

S.C.: Tell us about the novel you’re writing.

G.C.: Towing Trouble is about an ex-convict, tow truck driver, John Samson, who is trying to solve his brother’s murder.  The book has Evanovich characteristics although Samson does not blow up as many cars as Stephanie Plum.

S.C.: You have published nonfiction, poetry, and you’re working on a novel. Can you do some compare and contrast of the three forms?

G.C.: I find the amount of research required for nonfiction disruptive to my writing process. Perhaps that is an excuse. I am just not interested in writing it anymore.

Fiction is very difficult, especially longer pieces. Keeping the narrative thread tight and the details consistent are constant challenges. Writing a novel is hard work, especially with Spider Solitaire on my computer.

My fiction is too sparse but this works to my advantage in verse. Poetry is fun. The fellowship and humor of other poets brings me joy. Their willingness to teach novices is a daily surprise. And I get fewer rejection letters so it must be a better fit.

S.C.: In retirement, you’ve become a bit of a world traveler. Do you travel with an object?

G.C.: I travel to western Kenya every other year to interview kids at the orphanage and help as I am able.  I try to visit another African country while I am in the area. In Rwanda last year, I climbed up to see the mountain gorillas.

Travel takes me out of the small place where I live and enriches my life and my poetry.

S.C.: What next?

G.C.: I would like to get Towing Trouble finished and sold. In a couple of years, I would like to put out a full size poetry collection. The tentative title is Education of a Skeptic. I will be workshopping the infant manuscript at Hindman this summer.  And in September, my sister and I will be climbing from 6,000 to 9,000 feet on Mount Kilimanjaro.

Sheri Wright

She Rides The Clouds Bareback

How else can she feel
the roll and sweep of herself
set loose from gruff chatter and
sidesaddles and wedding bands
cluttering, buzzing the air like gnats
that compel her to reach into silence
where currents would have her
become the flow of her own veins.

               *

One last stunt-
first to fly around the world-
and she can retire from proving herself,
and to herself over and over
that size doesn�t matter in the cockpit
when a woman�s small hands
can guide a ten ton tin-whistle
anywhere she wants.

And there are no more records to break.
She has done them all,
crossed both oceans alone
with her frailness, the constant nausea,
fatigue, headaches, despising any
hand to help a lady cross the street.
She was one of those
who kicked off the training wheels
before learning to ride,
knew her curls would cushion her head
if she were to fall.

One island, one mile long to land on
in the middle of the sea,
miss-mapped by five miles
is like picking the north star from the sky
with your eyes closed.
An un-agreed on frequency to call for help
       details, details.
What about Morse code?
        More clutter to fill my head.
A parachute, just in case?
And break the spell? Do you know
I had to drive with my eyes closed-
though no one knew it-
just to show I understood the concept
of forward motion and could reach the pedals,
shift and steer and breath all at the same time?

               *

Her navigator guides drink after drink
in for a perfect landing
on emptiness, unchartable,
where no rescuer can find
even a scrap of debris floating,
only wave after wave-
the sea licking its lips.

               *

How else can she know
that even when clouds lose their shapes
and fall into the sea
as drops of rain,
she will always gather
back into the sky
pulled up by stars.

— Sheri Wright, originally published in Earth’s Daughter’s #74

Look for this poem in Sheri’s forthcoming Finishing Line chapbook, The Courtship of Reason.

Sheri is the author of Nuns Shooting Guns and Sharks Never Sleep, both from Flood Crest Press. In addition to The Courtship of Reason, she will have another book out soon titled Contains Scenes of Indigenous Nudity.

Gail Chandler

Malawi

The warm heart of Africa �
I first heard those words
at midnight on the unlighted lawn
of the Zambezi Sun.

I was standing
in the dark smoking
when a small dusky man
arrived beside me
smelling of wood fires
and grief.

We talked of
Appalachian mountains
and Malawi hills.
Then he faded
into the shadows

— E. Gail Chandler, from Where the Red Road Meets the Sky (Finishing Line, 2009).
Reprinted by permission of the author.

E. Gail Chandler�s poems and short stories have appeared in Appalachian Heritage, Limestone, Back Home in Kentucky, Kudzu, Pegasus and the anthologies, Standing on the Mountain: Voices of Appalachia and Motif. Her nonfiction book, Sunflowers on Market Street, was published in 2003 and a chapbook of poetry, Where the Red Road Meets the Sky, is pending publication by Finishing Line Press. Chandler has degrees from Berea College in Kentucky and The New School in New York City and served three years in the Marine Corps during the Vietnam era.

Proceeds from the sale of Gail’s Finishing Line chapbook go to support Vihiga Children’s Home in western Kenya. Gail says:

The money will be used to pay teachers at the school on the facility grounds. The children, [shown in the photo below] mostly AIDS orphans, at this school, Edith Junior,scored the highest in the district although the teachers receive the lowest salaries — averaging about $50 per month. Currently the school is not funded and limps along from month to month based on what I can raise.

So buy a copy of Gail’s book. You get good poetry and help these Kenyan teachers and children.