Jim Chandler

Smoke & Thunder: Collected Poems Jim Chandler

If you're a fan of 'moon, spoon, June' poetry, Smoke & Thunder is not for you. There are no sweet rhymes to be found inside these pages, no saccharine poetics spouted strictly for the sake of linguistic beauty. The free verse here, however lyrical at times, rides the hard edge of the road, having issued from the brain of a man who has pushed himself to dangerous extremes more times than he cares to recall, but always survived for the recounting, torn and tattered though he may have been. Many of the poems here are brutal and unrelenting, rife with tragedy and anger, but always honest to a fault. And yet the true heart of the poet shows through, as in the memorial poem for his father and poems about his grandparents. Whether over coffee in a restaurant with his peers, or passing a bottle of wine around a burn barrel at a junkyard, this poet's home is the world. The more than one hundred poems in Smoke & Thunder, most of which were written during the past two decades, represent a small part of a lifetime's work for a man past 60.