Tides & Currents - Softcover

Tides & Currents will carry you on a voyage that covers a lot of formal territory, propelled consistently by a subtle and playful ear. But these poems aren’t exercises; narrative, sensory perception and emotional heft are never sacrificed to big music, loftiness. Jane Blanchard never loses sight of an intensely human, domestic world, one that can conjure a childhood memory of camping or evoke a bustling restaurant as deftly as it deals with the trauma of a miscarriage or an affair. A strand of tinsel is rendered as poignantly and convincingly as a male grackle or a minnow trap. There are so many memorable images and conceits here.

—Ralph Sneeden, author of Evidence of the Journey

Like “one nautilus facing another,” Jane Blanchard’s collection of poems, Tides & Currents, contains a wonderful symmetry of form as it draws the reader through the various vicissitudes, labors, and joys of a long life, filled as it is with Chiclets that “might quicken the dead” or “relics of an edgy, shingled world” that could send us off in a direction where “a wrong move means death or worse.” As Blanchard reminds us, “No person ever born escapes the rain.” But these poems also recognize the vibrant power for rain to strengthen faith and renew the world as “desire does itch anew,” and we discover a “little something extra so satisfies [our] appetite that [we] keep going back for more.”

—Tony Morris, author of Pulling at a Thread

Dear Reader, here are songs of experience, songs of joy, songs of irony and wisdom—many embodied within the same poem. Listen close, savor long!

—Nick Norwood, author of Gravel and Hawk, winner of the Hollis Summers Prize for Poetry