Tag: Jane Blanchard
Metes and Bounds / Jane Blanchard
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
Publisher: Kelsay Books, 68 pages, $20.00
Also available from Amazon.com
Sooner or Later / Jane Blanchard
L’Amour / Jane Blanchard
Jane Blanchard lives and writes in Georgia (USA). Her poetry has recently been published in Australia, Austria, Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Her latest collection is Never Enough Already (2021).
After Before / Jane Blanchard
Jane Blanchard’s newest poetry collection After Before has a steady rhythm page to page, moving from short to long form and back again, signaling a fearless passing of time and seasons. A youngster is roused to “soar into the sky” without fear of death in “Take Flight, My Child.” A mother breastfeeds fearlessly in “Sustenance” as an aging beachgoer frolics shamelessly in his Speedo in “Out and About at Dawn.” Blanchard’s words illuminate the journey of anyone panning life’s moments for gold while courageously facing down “fools and facts and fears and such.”
—Lori Cameron, editor, The Penwood Review
Where to begin? Nearly every poem has at least one passage that deserves quoting. Even the short, untitled verses between poems offer food for thought or bring a smile. This is a large and delightful collection, technically skillful, varied in subject, sharp in observation, and fun to read. After Before is the best collection I have read in a long time.
—Jack Hart, editor, Ship of Fools
The comforting metaphors and well-modulated rhythms in Jane Blanchard’s After Before are like eavesdropping on the secrets best friends whisper to one another—or the confessions of a long marriage where terseness and gentle humor are always appreciated. You’ll be glad you listened in.
—Jerry Bradley, poetry editor, Concho River Review
Available now from 
Third Wednesday Magazine 