The Woodcarver's Wife
by Sherry
Chandler
Wind
Publications, 2014
ISBN:
978193613866174 pages
http://windpub.com/books/woodcarver.htm
I first met Sherry Chandler several years ago at a reading and panel discussion held as part of the Kentucky Women Writers Conference in Lexington, Kentucky. The past two years I've enjoyed participating with her and other poets in writing a new poem every day during the month of June for the Lexington Poetry Month Writing Challenge, organized by Hap Houlihan of the Morris Book Shop and Katerina Stoykova-Klemer of Accents Publishing to promote local poets and poetry.
(I also had the good fortune to interview Sherry. Click here for the interview.)
(I also had the good fortune to interview Sherry. Click here for the interview.)
—Karen
L. George
__________
Review of Sherry Chandler's The Woodcarver's Wife
Sherry
Chandler's The Woodcarver's Wife
revolves around her forty year marriage to "Thomas, the Woodcarver,"
to whom the book is dedicated, and the farm in Kentucky where they lived. Her
poems are grounded in lush concrete detail, particularly of the natural world, enlivened
by her exquisite sense of humor and wit, and suffused with
an irresistible essence of tenderness and
longing.
In
the first poem of collection, "Amateur Photography," with the
epigraph "For Thomas on His 61st Birthday," Chandler introduces us to
some of her layered and recurring motifs such as personal histories, the
importance of memory and reverence for the past, the honoring of various types
of creation in art and craft (whether it be woodcarving photography, music, writing,
knitting or crocheting), and the dualities and cycles of life. This poem is
based on a photograph evidently taken many years ago as her husband blew out candles
on his birthday cake. In the following last two stanzas of the poem she gives
us a sense of their connection through imagery:
I want to tease that wrist with my
finger
the way a child might trace
the letters of her name.
I'd learn a hunger for more than
cake,
a flame that consumes
and with each consummation fires
again.
There
is such tenderness and yearning in the image of a child tracing her name, and
it creates a sense of tension with the following stanza and its image of desire
as the element of fire that "consumes" and yet becomes even stronger.
This ending image of "a flame that consumes and ...fires again" suggests
the phoenix
of Greek mythology, a bird that is reborn from its own ashes, also associated with the
sun and its cycles. Various types of cycles thread
these poems along with the elements of nature: earth, air, fire, and water.
This poem begins with "you with lips shaped / to your breath" and
later the phrase "the wish breath," introducing the image of
elemental air.
The
poem "Duet," near the end of the collection, mirrors "Amateur
Photography" with its epigraph "An epithalamium for Thomas on his 60th
birthday." "Duet" speaks of how the couple has aged, and transforms
the image of elemental air in "Amateur Photography" to: "I wake myself snoring. This morning
/ I woke to our duet, gentle buzzing / a little out of time." She goes on
to say: "We start / each day with
variations on a theme of ache," one of many examples of the poet's
charming sense of humor—some gentle whining mixed with
acceptance of things as they are. The poem ends evocatively with a remembrance
of their wedding day, and the lines:
...This January
dawn I compose myself in the warmth
of you along my length, grateful
you're
still my side man in this sometimes
off-
key, always modulating measure.
The
use of contrasting images of warmth and coldness repeats throughout these poems,
as in "Bonfire:" with: "...bake my aches / against the hot brick
of your back." The lovely echo of the long "a" in "bake"
and "aches" along with the alliterative use of "b" and
"k" add emphasis to the image.
The element of water is introduced
in the poem, "Sonnenizio On a Line From Hayden Carruth." A sonnenizio
is a form of the sonnet, where
you take a line from another poet’s sonnet to use as the first line of your
sonnenizio, and then repeat one word from that first line in each of the
subsequent 13 lines, ending with a rhymed couplet. Chandler borrows her first
line from Carruth's The Sleeping Beauty,
"The fury of romance, surging, resurging, wet—" and then every
line ends in the word "wet," perfect for a poem about love and
passion. She contrasts the opening line's "fury of romance" to say
"Ours was rain after drought, a wet / that heals cracked earth"—just
one example of the way she uses earth images.
This contrasting image of wet vs.
dry recurs throughout the collection. In the poem, "Dry October,"
near the end of the collection, she opens the first stanza with "The
ground is hard with drought" and ends with "We find no forgiving
softness." The poem tells of burying their cat and concludes with the haunting
imagery "The moon / is humpbacked. We crunch back to the house." The
"crunch" refers to the dried leaves underfoot, but it also suggests
brittle bones and the creaks our limbs make as we age. This is reinforced by the
following poem, "Numerology," which opens with "I'm brittle as a
stick of stale Juicy Fruit, / porous to the bone." While this image has a
humorous quality to it, it also holds the rub of reality—the challenges aging
forces on us. In the lush "Medjool Dates" the succulence of the dates
contrasts with the aches of the couple's "extremities, ends / of fingers
that crook, yet will not bend / to our will."
Chandler mirrors nature's cycles with the cycles of human life, and
also how even the structures we work and live in deteriorate over time. In
the poem "What Bugs Us," termites, spiders, crickets, wasps, wood
bees, and moths are having their way with the couple's house. The poem ends
with the grim line "The end's the same: we eat until we're eaten." The
poem, "Tobacco Barn," opens with "A wake of turkey vultures
makes a roost / of its ruined roof...their shadows gliding over the
grass." It ends with "The shell of ours will stand a few years more /
the uneasy tenancy of this scavenger colony— / but vultures are magnificent
when they soar." Again we see this duality of life (birth and death,
health and illness, beauty and violence) reflected in the stark image of the
vultures as scavengers and yet the poet is able to recognize their beauty
"when they soar."
Along
with this idea of duality, Chandler writes of challenges involved in marriage
paired with the idea of things falling into disrepair in "Attrition": "It's too late now to whine about the
state / of things. Of course the kitchen tap will leak / if you don't replace
the washers...The drip in the attic won't wait / until you turn the last page
of War and Peace." In
"Rough Winds," written "after Shakespeare's Sonnet 18," she
says,
I blow my cool and have a temper fit
and you retreat in anger and dismay
to brood among your scorps and
router bits,
"Rough
Winds" brings in the element of air metaphorically, but there are poems
about literal rough winds, such as in "Poem Beginning With a Line from
Helen Losse," where the couple go:
down underground in basement caves
to ride out its reliable fury.
When it passes we'll clear debris—
torn trees, slashed shingles—burn
and bury
The
above lines exemplify Chandler's use of internal rhyme, assonance and
alliteration that create a lovely sense of rhythm and music throughout her
collection, part of what makes her poems come alive. The repeated "ow"
sound in "down" and "underground," the long "a"
sound in "basement" and "caves," the long "i"
sound in "ride" and "reliable," along with the repeated
"s" sound in "trees, slashed shingles" create an opulence
of sound that resembles what they might have heard during the storm.
In
speaking of the rhythm and music of the poems, I want to also mention that many
of the poems are written in various forms, such as the sonnet, sonnenizio
(discussed above), pantoum, and terza rima, with specific end rhyme schemes,
adding to the enticing sound patterns of her poems. I was particularly struck
by her expert use of slant rhyme in such pairings as "even/robins,"
"freeze/leaves," "content/lament," "bloom/time," and
"seeds/feast."
Another
type of rhythm is created in several poems through Chandler's use of lists. In "Sonnenizio
On a Line From Hayden Carruth" she lists various instances of wetness, in "Clearing
Out" items someone has collected throughout a lifetime, and in "Bennet's
New Latin Grammar (1895): A Love
Poem" the following hypnotic list of terms related to Latin: "...
copulatives / and supines...dactylic foot and caesura. Diastole,
systole...parataxis, hypotaxis, clauses of
wish / and proviso." In "The Woodcarver's
Wife," the long title poem that comprises Section II, she uses several
lists. Part 5 lists types of tools. She begins with:
Chain saws
pole saws
bow saws
adzes
scoops
mauls
wedges
And ends with:
Chisels
gouges
lathes
and planes
as many and golden
as autumn leaves:
fingers and fores
jointers and jacks
rabbets and scrubs
There is such music in the way she arranges these items as well, for
example in following "scoops" with the like sounding
"scorps," and "lathes" and "planes," and in
repeating the consonant sounds of "f," "j," "r,"
and "b" in the last three lines above. The way she uses the very
short lines also adds motion to the list so that it becomes a chant, a litany, a
celebratory song. In part 9, the last part of the poem, she lists types of
trees:
Rock maple, water
maple, sugar maple,
black cherry, black
walnut, black locust,
black oak, burr oak,
The poet appears to have carefully thought out how to arrange these
trees for optimal effect. She combines
the different types of maples, then all the types of trees with
"black" in their names, then types of oak. Again this list
accumulates into a pleasing rhythm, and conveys a sense of the poet's connection
and deep appreciation for the variety and beauty of the natural world. These
lists also add to the playful, teasing tone of the poem. The poem begins with the line "Men love
blades." It goes on to describe "wood-be carvers" that
"stroke the arched / cherry vessel...fondle the turned / pear
bowl...," sexual imagery emphasized by the short lines shaped like a
phallus on the page.
The poem "The Woodcarver's Wife" is also an intimate song of
seduction, and I couldn't help but think of the Sirens of Greek mythology. The
following lines are interspersed throughout the poem like a song's refrain,
using whimsical internal rhyme, addressed to her husband: "Woodcarver, my
Lad with the Adze," "Woodcarver, my Knave with a Shave,"
"Woodcarver, my Swain with the Plane," and "Woodcarver, my Scamp
with a Scorp." The flirtation continues with such lines as "Join me.
We'll be mortise and tenon, dovetails, / butterfly wedges" along with the
tenderness of "our union / cups us deep in heartwood that, polished dark
by / use, resists decay, thus outlasting younger / juicier sapwood."
Chandler
adds richness to her poems by referencing Biblical figures such as Eve and
Mary, and literary figures (ancient to modern), such as Catullus, Virgil, Shakespeare,
Milton, Cyrano de Bergerac, Rilke, Hayden Carruth, William Stafford,
Helen Losse, and Tony Hoagland. In her poem "An Old Lover's Invitation to
Practice a Different Alchemy," I was delightfully reminded of both
Marlowe's poem "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" and Andrew
Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress." Chandler's "An Accounting"
plays wonderfully off of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "How Do I Love Thee?
(Sonnet 43)," and "For My Valentine, a Modern Pastural With a Lot of
Bull" playfully parodies the pastoral tradition of literature which
idealized rural life and landscapes.
These
poems are so full of life's abundance with their concrete details of people, places
and times, and yet this poet knows only too well that tragedy and death must
also make its appearance. In the chilling
"Jaws of Life" she sorts through a box of old jeans and finds a pair
with "both legs slit, ankle to waist" from when her sons were
wrenched "from the belly / of a smashed Geo Prism" when its battery
exploded. In "Clearing Out," she is "trying to separate treasure
from trash" after a loved one has died. The opening line asks the haunting
question "Who knows what will document a life?" This brings us again
to the motif of memory and personal histories. She tells us:
Some things I discovered and
rediscovered—
tortured shapes of tree fungus, a
pilfered chunk
of the petrified forest, a dusty
starfish,
one leg broken off at the tip, a
bracelet, each
link the flag of an Allied Nation.
The
poem "Memento Mori" starts out so beautifully (except the title
foreshadows) "...each blade of grass glistened. / I was planting onion
sets / in earth worked fine and fragrant," until she hears one of the
spring calves "sudden bawl—uncanny / gurgling bray." The
calf dies, the poet tells us, and though it happened thirty years ago, she
can't forget how the calf:
...butted at every
udder that looked like mother,
suckling the only source she knew—
how her need was met with kicks,
even from that which birthed her—
how the old cows seemed to know
she was no longer like them,
an eater, had already
become a feeder of grass.
In
"Toxicodendron radicans" she battles with poison ivy in her "bed
of daffodils and iris" (some of them "heirlooms,") and yet she
tells us the poison ivy "vine and rhizome / both were here long before I
came," suggesting the dualities inherent in what comes from the earth, how
everything interconnects. The poem creates such a whimsical image:
... I claw the earth with condomed
fingers, grasp the root and heave
at occult tendrils tough and
entwined
as my Southern Baptist heritage.
It creeps for yards at grass roots,
and
I am pulled along its path, a fisher
hooked into Leviathan...
The
repeated hard "t" sound in the second line above creates the effect
of gritting her teeth as she engages in the battle, and yet I sense she is also
laughing at herself, imagining how she must look to someone else.
This
lightheartedness rubs up against the unpleasant realities of other poems,
creating a sense of back and forth, a tension that builds throughout the
collection. In "After 40
Years," near the end of the collection, she describes the corrosive things
happening at her home place: "The towering black locust that stands south
of the house / is infested with mistletoe now...and a bolt of lightning "crippled
/ the ash" and yet the hole left by the lightning has became "a
stairwell for squirrels." Which brings us back to the duality of life, and
how in nature, violence can bring something else to life. The end of the poem
creates such a sense of resilience, and its wickedly delightful sense of humor pays
homage to the past:
So where once you stood at the
threshold and sang
Raise
high the roofbeam, your member vertical as a drill,
mine in answer deep and fiery as a
hearth,
today we huddle by the dwindling
embers and remember.
The
luscious repetition of the "h," "r" and "l"
sounds adds to the sensual effect. The
mention of "hearth" and "embers" continues the element of
fire motif.
The
poems of The Woodcarver's Wife are grounded
and tied together by the poet's connection to the natural world and her
emphasis on the importance of place in her life—this farm in Kentucky where
she's lived with her husband for forty years. The poems are full of birds,
insects, plants and trees that inhabit their farm. Owls appear in several poems,
so fitting in this collection, because many owls mate for life. In "An Accounting" she refers to a
pair of owls as "the spirits of this place," and their song as a
"pair calling duet / under the Hunger Moon." In "On the Eve of
Leap Day," she says "Owls talk to night." In "Dissonance"
Chandler envisions an owl:
She is out there somewhere,
nested in the hollow of an oak,
brooding a single egg.
In
the poem "Homeplace with Birds and Trees" she describes the position
of the sun and moon behind specific trees in the different seasons, saying,
"These periods of home I know as my tongue knows the map / of my
teeth." In "Ephemera" she walks into an area of their land that
they let grow wild, where "deer take refuge" among "blackberry
canes, / goldenrod, / swarms of viceroys / and bees. // Along the leaf-mold
floor, / a twisting grapevine / binds all into slow silence."
The
collection ends with the poem "Beginning" which creates a satisfying
sense of having come full circle. The poem starts with the haunting lines:
I
don't know how to begin, you say. No more
do I. How do we see begin with end
so imminent, and how do we begin
to end?...
Like
many poems in this collection, "Beginning" speaks about the circularity
of life, the paradox of how when we're near the end of life, we feel as if
we're only beginning, and how we struggle with imagining the end of our lives,
how we will actually go through that process. She ends the poem and the
collection with what she states as "Only one thing I know:"
We spin in common orbit.
Faithful companions, like the Dog
Stars,
we'll wobble our way to an end, binary.
While this poem may be unsettling, it's also comforting and beautiful—a perfect way to end this collection that speaks to so many of life's dualities.
The
poems in Sherry Chandler's The
Woodcarver's Wife vibrate with exquisite sound, imagery, emotional
resonance and layered meaning. She looks unflinchingly
into her past with glances to her future, but these poems remain rooted in the
abundance of the present moment, with gratitude for her life partner, and
reverence for the land and its inhabitants. The
Woodcarver's Wife invites us to look more closely at our own history, and
how we connect to the people, places, and essences that comprise our lives.
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