What Shapes a Life?
In Ann Fox Chandonnet’s new book: The Shape of Wind on Water, New and Selected Poems (Loom Press, 2023), her shaping began on an 180=acre apple and dairy farm on Marsh Hill in Dracut, Mass., in the arms of her Great Grandmother. In Chandonnet’s poem, “Voice Lessons,” we meet Great-Gram, Addie Richardson Fox, a woman born during the Civil War and who “left the farm,” as Chandonnet puts it, at the close of World War II.
All I can see now is her photograph;
she stands among bushes.
dark they are
like her severe dress,
severe like her face,
like the musty covers of her methods books
in the attic’s peeling trunks.
Great-Gram—severe as she may have been—nevertheless was the source of Chandonnet’s love of words. Like a spring, Great-Gram chants, croons, and pats little Ann’s hands as she carries the newborn about the house and the land. This collection of poems, old and new, is like a journey fulfilled that began on Dracut soil.
And what a journey. You’d be hard pressed to find another 1940’s-era Lowell-born, Dracut-raised woman who had, as her first job, teaching school on Kodiak Island in Alaska. In this collection, poems about those 34 years in the Far North mix with ones about life in a log cabin in North Carolina, as well as time spent in the California Sierras. In every poem, though, I hear those Dracut farm echoes, like Great-Gram’s voice from the hayfield.
As in the poem, “Learning Eskimo Dancing/Lighting Up the World:” The drumbeat is a brook rippling over shale / soothing as Gregorian. Or in “Sitka:” A root puts its arm around the shoulder of a stump / the upward spiral of Swainson’s thrush / pierces the underbrush with a spear of song. There’s Great-Gram singing. Because what shapes you, nurtures you, all of your days.
I am drawn to Chandonnet’s poems about the land. She writes in a disarming way of discovering an ermine behind the living room drapes, or a snowshoe hare rattling the cooking pots outside her tent on Tuckerman’s Ravine—a domestic intimacy that plays off the cultural tropes of ruggedness one expects from the wilds of Alaska or a cirque on Mount Washington.
My favorite in the collection is “Sides-to-the-Middle”—and yes, it’s about Addie Louise, good old Great-Gram, and a bedsheet she had repaired over and over because: Yankee thrift, but also: to preserve beauty. Something that Ann Fox Chandonnet does masterfully herself, in her life’s journey of words.
This sheet has travelled from Massachusetts
to California to Alaska to North Carolina—
has seen more of the world than great-grandmother did.
No matter.
Now frost threatens the new weeping cherry tree,
and knowing Addies love of cherries,
I pull out the sheet.
I staple it over the mouse-ears of green.
It flaps in the wind: a vanilla lollipop.
A week later, the tree blooms.
_______
Susan April, born in Lowell, Mass., and raised nearby in Dracut, has published poems and essays in literary magazines, anthologies, and blogs, including The Lowell Review and When Home is Not Safe. A longtime environmental scientist, she lives in Maryland.