I got home a few hours ago and found a copy of Candice Ward's chapbook in
the mail. I've just finished reading it. Twice. And I'll be reading it again
and again. The poems are absolutely poems most rare. Not one is derivative,
not one was really like anything I've read. I think I once read that, in Irish
folktales, one doesn't really know when one has passed from this world into
the world of Faerie--not right away--(I probably got this from G.K. Chesterton)
. . . it just happens and you begin to notice a certain difference, a strangeness,
colors more vibrant or wan, everything sharper . . . some place absolutely real.
And, really, for me these poems create another world. One particular grace--one
I noticed when I read her poem "Vertigo under Mistletoe"--is somehow
making words from fine old ancient hoards (words like "laurel" and
"cherry" and "starry" and "dun" and "char")
come back with all of the old associations, through all the haphazardness of
outworn poesies and
come back to be there again--the same, the different, the essence somehow recovered
and new in a new world .
Joe Green