Chained Tree, Chained Owls: Poems (Southern Poetry)

CATHARINE SAVAGE BROSMAN, Emerita Professor of French of at Tulane University, has published nearly forty books of poetry, fiction, and literary scholarship. This is her twelfth book of verse. It returns freshly to her familiar territory of New Orleans, the Southwest, France, and the despoiling of our contemporary culture.
Of contemporary American poets, only Catharine Savage Brosman possesses the wit, erudition, and technical skills to pull off this tour de force, a combination lyrical travelogue and bracing, biting account of our moral and artistic decline. Her work holds a firm place in the tradition of Swift, Pope, and Larkin. —Randall Ivey, University of South Carolina-Union, author of A New England Romance and Other Southern Stories.
It is all simply gorgeous, jaw-droppingly beautiful work. . . . She is unsurpassed in her geological descriptions among all poetry written in English. —Jennifer Reeser, author of Indigenous and Sonnets from the Dark Lady and Other Poems.
Catharine Savage Brosman, one of the few writers in the history of literature to reach excellence in both poetry and fiction, has given us a collection of what she dubs quintains, five-line poems in iambic pentameter rhymed ababa. Her mastery of English prosody is complete, and each poem engraves itself on the reader’s memory with its perfectly crafted diction. Brosman’s aesthetic sensibility, her ability to experience the essence of the magic in towers (real and fictional) and especially cathedrals, is at the highest spiritual pitch. She also shows again that she is one of our finest evocateurs of a remarkable range of landscape in words. ‘Love beauty, mortals, while you can,’ ends one quintain, and Brosman is one of those keeping it alive for us in these latter days. —Jonathan Chaves, Professor of Chinese Literature, The George Washington University; poet and translator of Cloud Gate Song: The Verse of Tang Poet Zhang Ji and other works.