Product Description

The unexpected light in these poems is a certain sort of light: faint, slant, the light of twilight or a fading penlight or a barely discernible sliver of moon. Yet the poems pierce and burn.

-Kate Bernadette Benedict, editor, Umbrella

These poems, at once observational and prophetic, draw on the sometimes harrowing incisiveness of an empirical mind to produce an extraordinary vision. C.E. Chaffin is a poet of the body, but he is also a poet of conscience, a poet who infuses the lyric with a spiritual temperance born of experience. Here are words in service of integrity, poems in service of necessary revelations, and a poet in service of attention at its most elemental and unsettling."

-- Seth Abramson, poet

"These are poems which point both south toward anxiety and north toward hope, keeping the compass needle moving. C. E. Chaffin is a doctor with a physician's keen objective eye. His poems employ a music jazzed and melancholy, with a strong sense of dislocation and a painterly sensibility that resonate in the mind's optic."

--Lynn Strongin, editor of "Sorrow Psalms" and "Crazed by the Sun"

"Robinson Jeffers said, 'Pleasure is the carrot dangled to lead the ass to market; or the precipice.' The carrots are here. So are the precipices. Clean and spare, absent turgid image, these poems don't confound or perplex. Frankly they're too clever for that. The result of Chaffin's pointed observations is not clinical in any sterile sense, rather a dialectical body-lyric beyond, yet still beholden to, mere blood and bones. What we have here is a maturation of the soul."

--from a review by Norman Ball

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3384845 in Books
• Published on: 2009-03-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 174 pages

Customer Reviews

Norman Ball on "Unexpected Light"
C. E. Chaffin commences his book with a rather direct manifesto: "I want to tell the truth / I want to tell it straight." Fair enough. The hidden inference is that he's long since tired of mind play for mind play's sake. This an earnest bid for unfiltered communion, intelligent poetry in the very best sense. Clean and spare, absent turgid image, these poems don't confound or perplex. Frankly they're too clever for that.

This is a large collection, spanning ten years, 150 pages and myriad styles and life periods. There are even sonnets for more formalist tastes. There is no narrative arc in the post-modern sense unless of course the mere passage of one life is permitted claim to arc status. Aristotle's first element of tragedy is plot followed immediately by character. Here we have plot and character in abundance as the poet ruminates various plot twists over a period of years: his losses, his illnesses, his gods and his love. The voice is multifarious as one would expect across a decade of life's episodes yet authentically whole. This collection is a harrowing, remarkable journey distilled though a keen expressive mind. I can't recommend it more highly.

--Norman Ball