[Paul Stevens]

White Violet Press is spectacularly on the rise, and has now published a new book of Cathy Chandler's work, This Sweet Order, which is available on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/This-Sweet-Ord...3030936&sr=1-1

I can vouch (if such were needed) for the contents, having read the collection in MS — it's a very nice read with Cathy's craftsmanship and insight richly represented.

Other recent White Violet Press publications include Philip Quinlan's Head Lands (he bears watching, that lad — he's doing some seriously good work), and Janet Kenny's beautiful This Way to the Exit.

http://www.amazon.com/Headlands-Phil...3049533&sr=8-1

http://www.amazon.com/This-Way-Exit-...3049684&sr=1-1

All three collections contain poems that I've been proud to publish in Shit Creek Review, The Chimaera, and The Flea.

[Charlotte Innes]

Congrats to Cathy!

Hey, thanks for posting, Paul. It's actually White Violet Press (did it change its name?).

And don't forget Gail White!

http://www.amazon.com/Sonnets-Hostil...3071178&sr=1-1

Charlotte

[Paul Stevens]

You're right, Charlotte, & I was ronj. Karen Kelsay does both Victorian Violet and White Violet I think, hence my dopey confusion. But her Violet by any variant name is still publishihg great stuff. Karen's a member here, isn't she?

[Paul Stevens]

I'm having a senile scatterbrained day today -- it slipped my mind about Gail's book being out already. Hooray! But Philip's book SHOULD be titled Head Lands -- Amazon has entered it wrongly I reckon.

[Catherine Chandler]

"Blurbs" for This Sweet Order from Deborah Warren, Tim Murphy and Paul Stevens:

The sonnets in This Sweet Order sit at the confluence of music, intellect, and philosophy. Some sonnet-writers are content to fill in the pentameter like a puzzle where form trumps meaning. For Catherine Chandler, word and idiom are primary; she bends the form into the service of the content. The poem announces itself as a sonnet only insofar as its structure (quatrain, octave, sestet, couplet) is integral to the idea. The subject might be a flower, a highway, a season, or a loss: expect wisdom; expect plenty of wit: expect surprises.

If poems like ‘Matryoshka’ and ‘Sonnet Love’ are easy on the ear, above all they delight the mind. Chandler is a philosopher: ‘Assembly’, ‘She’, and ‘Mother’s Day’ (for example) articulate thoughts with such immediacy that I almost feel as if I’m inside the poem. These are not poems that let you get away with just reading them. They bring you right into the conversation.


— Deborah Warren






Cathy Chandler is the irritating girl you grew up with, perfect in her white pinafore while you, stupid boy, were bloodying your nose in the schoolyard, hated by the nuns. Read this book of sonnets and give thanks for perfection.


— Timothy Murphy






Catherine Chandler’s chapbook, from its very title down to the smallest element in each poem, reflects the central creative paradox of the sonnet form: the book itself is a highly complex, yet fundamentally simple organisation of highly complex, yet simple, individual components. This Sweet Order comprises twenty-seven sonnets set out in a sequence where the overall organisational principle itself shapes meaning which is reflected and probed in detail in each individual piece. The sequence embodies an extraordinary synergy of surgically precise use of language, trope and structure to examine, delineate and serve, with immense poetic authority, a series of writs which enact, contain and codify ‘the delicate forensics of the heart’.

This poet has earned unequalled dominance of the traditional sonnet form among contemporary poets: here the result is a sequence which poetically illuminates the interior life of that which makes us human. But for all her immense skill as a poet, Chandler is also a curandera: these poems do not only illuminate — they heal. I read a great many sonnets in the course of teaching and editing: Catherine Chandler’s stand out for their technical mastery and intimate humanity. Highly recommended.


— Paul Christian Stevens, Editor, The Flea, The Chimaera, SCR

[Tim Murphy]

It's a terrific collection, and I like my blurb best!

[Seree Zohar]

Cathy! wowee! Lovely to see such news.

[Bill Carpenter]

Congratulations! Look forward to it!

[David Rosenthal]

Congrats Cathy.

David R.

[Paul Stevens]

That is indeed a blooming good blurb, Tim!