Metes and Bounds

With Metes and Bounds, her sixth collection in seven years, Jane Blanchard extends her admirable consistency. Whether in sonnets, quatrains, or couplets, epigrams, sestinas, or terza rima, 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. Metes and Bounds gives resounding proof that Blanchard is not only a prolific formalist poet but also one of our best. -Matthew Brennan, author of Snow in New York: New and Selected Poems

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."

-Charles Hughes, author of Cave Art and The Evening Sky