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.
