Sherry Chandler

Sheri’s castaways

Here is what I wrote in my cover blurb to Sheri Wright’s Finishing Line chapbook The Courtship of Reason:

Sheri L. Wright has stolen fire from the gods and she’s not about to say she’s sorry. To the contrary, she wants us all to come over for the wienie roast. I assure you, the guest list is fill with characters well worth meeting . . .

The Courtship of Reason is like a volume of highly condensed Southern gothic short stories — the shorter Lewis Nordan perhaps or a flash Flannery O’Connor.

There is, for example, “Diehlia Dyer,” who soaks her dentures in the toilet tank::

those blue tablets
that keep the bowl so clean
do a beautiful job on teeth.
Porcelain is porcelain.

She uses the money she saves on denture cleaner to buy bird seed

. . . gotta put something back
into the world for being in it.

And then there’s Cliffy Edger who thinks seagull droppings are holding his shingles on, and “The Projectionist” who thinks of the movie audience as an orchestra with himself as conductor, controlling the music of their oohs and aahs.

These are brash and sassy poems that Sheri herself describes as my quirkiest book yet. She knows that the earth is in a fast spin and, like Superman, she wants to fly fast enough to

. . . catch up and hold on,
swing past frost
before it etches its fingers
over the last buds,
and I will be there
just ahead
to always watch them open.

But Sheri is not without her lyric moments, as in the poem “Beggars and Buskers,” which I will quote in full because it is short and because I think it states the theme of Sheri’s work.

Beggars and Buskers

And don’t we all
have our tin cups
to rattle at passers-by,

our crippled parts
to drag behind us,

songs of sorrow
that plead
listen,

spare a coin
so we might sit
someplace warm

if only for a while.

The elusive beloved

Retired organic chemist David Manning is another scientist turned poet with a chap out from Finishing Line press.

Continents of Light is a collection of poems to the elusive beloved, to love unconsummated. These lost loves have many faces. There is the woman of the late night stroll on the beach by the amusement park,

Now, by the silent Ferris wheel, we stroll barefoot,
too light to sink in hourglass sand. South of Carmel
we walk on moon-mirrors where the surf runs
— “Moonstone Beach, Orgeon, to Punta Arenas, 3:15 a.m.”

the woman on the sailboat,

bright water off Carmel
into your azure latitudes,
my hand on the tiller, yours
on the sail.
— “Pier and Ocean”

the woman from ninth grade,

In the ninth grade Lenore
looked twenty, beautiful sophisticate
and with a name lilke French perfume
—”Lenore Boucher”

I was tempted to say these are all the California girls David loved and lost in his youth, but then there is the woman in the bar,

. . . She bends for Bushmills
and my nitroglycerine heart
signals danger.
— “Mirella”

These women have many faces and many ages, and all of them may well be The Muse.

I met David at the Wildacres Writing Workshop last summer. He is a soft-spoken man of keen intelligence and these poems reflect those traits. A California native, he lives in North Carolina now. He has published six chapbooks and a full-length collection, The Flower Sermon, from Main Street Rag.

Continents of Light is a collection of poems in which the still waters run deep. You will find much to relish in this chapbook.

A probable cat

Yesterday the mail carrier brought me my copy of Alan MacKellar’s Chasing Schroedinger’s Cat (Finishing Line, 2010). This morning I sat down in my rocker by the window to revisit these old friends, these poems, and reading the fine print, I was touched to find myself among those acknowledged and thanked. Alan and I have been companions on this journey of poetry for more than a decade, having met at a retreat sponsored by the Green River Writers. We have carpooled, met and read over coffee, worked together to find our two very different voices. If I have helped Alan shape these excellent poems, it is one of my highest achievements. But I think it’s more like we’ve been climbing buddies, helping one another over the rough spots.

Alan is a remarkable man. Trained in part at the Oak Ridge facility, he was a professor of theoretical nuclear physics at the University of Kentucky for 32 years. Ill health forced him to retire, so he took up photography and then poetry. Though the language of theoretical physics is poetic, it’s not every scientist who can make a poet. But Alan was raised in Detroit and the influence of the car culture of that Motor City, the music of that Motown, also show up in his work. Alan likes jazz. He has been a great admirer of Philip Levine.

From “Epitaph”

. . . my brother
rebuilds a Hudson Hornet till the horses
under the hood once book it thirty-one
miles from Royal Oak to Mount Clemens in eighteen
minutes with smoky pipes blowing out five
quarts of oil . . .

The result of this remarkable life is some remarkable stuff to work with. Here’s the opening of “Tower Shielding Facility”

I hold an orange, no a grapefruit,
but bigger, too big to hold,
too heavy, a uranium ball.
Cables lift it free of earth,
a radiant sphere of neutrons,
gammas, suspended unshielded
between four massive towers.

Here is where I spend
my first government hours . . .

According to GlobalSecurity.org,

A second Laboratory reactor resulting from the nuclear aircraft project was the Tower Shielding Facility, completed in 1953. Cables from steel towers could hoist a 1-MW reactor in a spherical container nearly 200 feet (60 meters) into the air. Because no shielding surrounded the reactor when suspended, it operated under television surveillance from an underground control room.

Containing uranium and aluminum fuel plates moderated and cooled by water, this reactor helped scientists answer questions about radiation from a reactor flying overhead; it also helped researchers better understand the type and amount of shielding that would be needed aboard a nuclear aircraft.

You can see it, here.

I find the poems that come from Alan’s long career as a physicist fascinating because the territory is alien, mind-boggling. In this collection, he has poems about scientists who have trapped and stopped light, scientists who are trying to write a Theory of Everything, and my favorite, probability theory as illustrated by “Erwin Schroedinger’s Cat.” It’s a poem from which the cat has slowly disappeared, more like the Cheshire perhaps, but fitting for a cat who may or may not be living at any given moment. But these are not dry theoretical poems. Though Alan insists on scientific accuracy, and is aggravated specifically by the ways in which writers have misused Schroedinger’s cat, he is skillful at exploiting the metaphoric value of his science.

Existence has probability
but measurement is everything.
I live with this superposition,
my half-life uncertain
as stirring of leaves
on this dead-calm day.

This poem has one of my favorite lines in the whole collection:

like fish breaking water—
nowhere to go but back in,

At 28 pages, Chasing Schroedinger’s Cat is long for a chapbook. It is the distilled story of a life, sometimes high as the shielding tower, sometimes low as the suicide of a child.

I search my albums for you,
count sixty-four photos,

. . .

I must have been there,
hidden behind a camera.
The images, frozen events:
measuring about
      one-half second
      of your 21 years.

A life of highs and lows. But where there is death in poetry, there is also love, and this life ends, as does the book, “serene” as an “October Morning”

Rene brings her morning
latte, an Earl Grey for me.
Dogs come up the deck.
Elbows to the railing,
we listen to a silent morning.

You can buy a copy of Chasing Schroedinger’s Cat here.

Dory L. Hudspeth

The Naming

A spring and sometimes into the summer
ritual involving rags, a bucket, oil,
engine-starter spray, some parts and filters.

Once all the ritual components are presented
to the lawn mower, the naming begins.
With each pull on the starter cord
the mower is named, beginning
with words of mild annoyance
and proceeding to titles that send the children
scurrying for shelter and women to shopping malls.

Most often an afternoon of drinking,
sweating and naming is the duration
of this festival, but sometimes it goes on for days
or intermittently on weekends. The longer the ritual continues
the larger number of village males become involved,
and the louder the naming becomes.
Somehow the volume counts for something.

The children did not learn those words on the school bus.

— Dory L. Hudspeth, used by permission of the author

Dory L. Hudspeth is the author of two books: I’ll Fly Away from Finishing Line, which I review here, and Enduring Wonders from Word Tech Editions. She has a poem in the forthcoming Motif:Chance anthology from MotesBooks and two poems in the most recent edition of ABZ.

Speaking of ABZ, Dory wanted me to mention the ABZ First Book Prize, reading in May & June. The judge for 2010 is Angela Ball and full guidelines can be found at the link.

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.