Sherry Chandler's Weaving a New Eden breaks the expectations of what a collection of poems typically achieves. Individually, the poems function on many levels--history, family narratives, lyrics--thus appealing to a wide audience. But the true accomplishment of this book is that each poem works in concert with the others, enriching the collection as a whole.
The book opens with personal lyrics of the Prologue, moves into an imagined history of the poet's family in The Grandmothers, digs deeper into history in the poems of The Frontier, and returns to the present and the lyric to close the book with the beautiful and flawless sonnet crown, The North Yard.
Many of the poems are historical. But this is not the stuffy history resigned to textbooks. In Sherry Chandler's hands, characters come to life on the page. Persona poems bring forth the lives of women who have been silenced heretofore, and the poems transform that silence into song.
The poems provide an unflinching look at rural Kentucky, traveling back in time to life on the frontier. Rebecca Boone, who receives a large amount of the attention in The Frontier section, tells us "I was giving birth to ten children / and a nation." Sherry Chandler imagines Rebecca as a weaver, and as Rebecca weaved clothing for her family, the poet weaves a new mythology. With skill, Sherry Chandler uses intricate forms--sestina, pantoum, sonnet crown--to weave language across the page.
In the sestina "Rebecca Boone Weaves a New Eden," a form that weaves the same six end words through each stanza, Sherry Chandler takes the metaphor to its apex, ending with:
Rebecca undertook to weave, she undertook to house
and clothe her children, dance the treadles in figured linen.
She undertook to throw her shuttle, Kentucky as the loom.
While many of the poems are written in formal verse, the reader might not even recognize the formal devices at work in the poems because of Sherry Chandler's skill using form; content and form work in harmony. Repetition is another tool Sherry Chandler uses to weave this new mythology--repetition within poems and across poems, giving a satisfying richness to the collection. The stories become myths; the characters become the reader's heroes. But readers are finicky about our repetition, and Sherry Chandler deftly varies the repetition so that it remains fresh.
In The Grandmothers section, Sherry Chandler writes acrostics using the names of women in her family to form the spine of each poem. She ends with her own acrostic; the last lines being:
Daughter of all these, I would sing for these women
Like Virgil--strong arms and the woman--
Except, of course, that that is not their style.
Rather I'll call you a dance to the figure of the Black-Eyed Girl.
Indeed the book is a bit like love song. As the reader gets to know the refrain, she wants to hear it again and again and sing along.
In Weaving a New Eden, Sherry Chandler serves as guide into the stories that live in the shadows of every family; as historian in line with Howard Zinn, insisting that the people's history is as important as the nation's; and above all as witness. In one of my favorite poems of the book (one of my favorite poems of any book), the poet as witness says, "I want a quiet, undemanding God, / a yellow light, not one that blinds, to see / the things I have to see when I'm alone." This book, epic in nature, is the gift of a poet adept at writing a range of emotion in a range of forms and brave enough to share those moments one sees when alone.
