Lines of Flight - Poems

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

Catherine Chandler’s Lines of Flight is a marvelously accomplished first collection. Even to call it a ‘first collection’ seems somehow misleading; it is a first collection as Housman’s A Shropshire Lad was. These are poems that have been long meditated and patiently crafted; they are distillations of experience captured in exquisite measures. There seems to be no form of which Catherine Chandler is not a master, from quatrains and Sapphics to ballads and pantoums. She is an especially brilliant sonneteer. Her formal artistry is not on display for its own sake but is employed with often lacerating effect to probe “the hush/of who I am.” These are poems steeped in the sorrows of lucidity. At the same time, she has a subtle eye for landscapes and foreign vistas, from Ushuaia to (even more exotic) Poughkeepsie. As she puts it, “Some things she loves for where they are.” Her poems on natural things, particularly those on birds, are alive with the rush of wings. For, though she modestly denies it, she is a poet who can “explicate the texture of the air.” Poem after poem offers what she calls “fugitive vignettes” and yet, despite her ironic title, there’s nothing fugitive about her verse. These beautiful poems have been made to last.
— Eric Ormsby