The Shape of Wind on Water: New and Selected Poems
The Shape of Wind on Water: New and Selected Poems
The Shape of Wind on Water is Ann Fox Chandonnet’s substantial collection of new and selected poems, some from her rural childhood in Massachusetts, and many from her thirty-four years in Alaska. Place has always been important to her. In 1968, her first book of poems was published in Madison, Wisc. In the following years, she wrote two cookbooks, four food histories, and a tourist guide to the Panhandle. She also founded the Literary Artists Guild of Alaska.
Ann Fox Chandonnet grew up on a 180-acre apple and dairy farm in Dracut, Mass. Then there were four years in California, followed by a rich life indoors and out in Alaska. She has worked as an English teacher in Kodiak, Alaska, and a police reporter in Juneau. Chandonnet has two grown sons and three lovely granddaughters. She and her husband of fifty-six years are “retired” to Lake St. Louis, Missouri, where they share Ann’s rescue dog, Gypsy Rose.
Praise
Ann Fox Chandonnet’s keen eye and ear, her art and intelligence, are evident everywhere in these pages. Here are poems steeped in the cadence of place—be it of a childhood on a Massachusetts farm or adulthood in Alaska—as they consider history, memory, literature, and the hard truths of the present day. The Shape of Wind on Water gathers together a fine and substantial life’s work.
—Jane Brox, author of Silence: A Social History of One of the Least Understood Elements of Our Lives
Here are stories infused with music and songs brimming with intelligence. Never sentimental and always grounded in life’s specifics, these are poems that open worlds of precarious delight. It was a privilege to be invited on this voyage. I was always in safe hands.
—Ray Hudson, Vermont educator and author of Moments Rightly Placed: An Aleutian Memoir
Like a Chinook—both a wind and the salmon—her art almost levitates from home streams where she has anchored herself. Ann Fox Chandonnet shapes us an enormous cut bank with her river of words. She is storyteller, as each poem is a chrysalis in her narrative. I feel cool gravel beds where my life as a reader galvanizes onto hers.
Ann’s attention to life encapsulations is the bedrock of her anadromous words. More than a hundred poems are celebratory as well as incantations for people, places, pathways taken. From the shape of her birth in Lowell, Mass., to her home haunts in Chugiak, Anchorage and Juneau, Alaska, to her residence in Vale, North Carolina, and now in Lake St. Louis, Missouri, Ann is the definition of “word smith,” as she’s honed her ear and mind’s eye to revel in humanity and Earth.
Her poetry is trawled from a multilayered observer of life, as she’s been a wife, teacher, mother, newspaper reporter, food historian, non-fiction book author, and poet. She collaborates with so many muses and historical narratives in this long collection. Yet, her voice is a mercurial shape of wind on water.
—Paul K. Haeder, essayist, educator, and author of the story collection Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam (Cirque), Oregon