Author Description

With <i><i>Metes and Bounds, </i> </i> her sixth collection in seven years, Jane Blanchard extends her admirable consistency. Whether in sonnets, quatrains, or couplets, epigrams, sestinas, or <i><i>terza rima, </i> </i> she artfully manages meter and rhyme while ingeniously keeping her lines conversational. Her subjects are diverse-religion, marriage, art, people-watching on a cruise-and her portrayal of illness is especially poignant. <i><i>Metes and Bounds</i></i> gives resounding proof that Blanchard is not only a prolific formalist poet but also one of our best.<p><br>-Matthew Brennan, author of <i><i>Snow in New York: New and Selected Poems</i></i></p><p></p><p><br>Jane Blanchard's lovely, bittersweet poems, in her latest collection, meditate on the mystery of pleasure and pain and their everyday side-by-side existence. As noted in "Camellias," "buds / . . . bloom one day and fall the next." In "The Kahler Grand Hotel," a Southern accent in a restaurant near the Mayo Clinic makes for a gently humorous glitch in the ordering process; this, against a possibly quite-threatening medical backdrop. And in the brief "sub rosa," in the midst of blood tests and bone scans, "the mind remains / the marriage thrives / the memory of love survives." There is technical mastery here and a good deal of music. And meaning, too, implied by the "metes" and "bounds" of the book's title: the sorrows of the world are not without limits known to faith. "You trust," as another poem says, "that God can sort all of it out."</p><p><br>-Charles Hughes, author of <i><i>Cave Art</i></i><i> </i>and<i> </i><i><i>The Evening Sky</i></i><i> </i></p>