Love Song: Port & Starboard - Paperback

by Ann Chinnis (Author)

I am truly, amazingly for once, speechless. Not because I'm "older than Hippocrates," or a blue heron just landed on my morning dock, and certainly not because "it's 5 a.m. in the ER, fluorescent lights buzzing." No, I am because I just finished reading Ann Chinnis's Love Song: Port & Starboard and am overwhelmed by the beauty of such profound compassion, the high exalted music of a prophet soul praising "the soft, brown bruise. . . of living." I don't fish or boat and am certainly not an ER doctor committed to an endless line of "drenched" emergencies, though now I know what all this feels like. Now I too am wrapped "bashful" in saving lives, and know what love feels like from the deep inside. Now I too want to "grab a handful of mane and fling" myself "onto destiny's haunches." This is poetry unlike anyone else's, songs that praise the living and the dead. Believe me, you too will be speechless.

-Philip Schultz, author, Failure and Pulitzer Prize winner

There but for the grace, one feels, as there with grace, when reading these tactile, heart-breaking poems that embrace the very heart of the human condition. Ann Chinnis strikes a profound balance - more a braiding - of solace and solitude out on the waters of forgiveness, with no small portion of soul-wrenching ashore. One can only wish to have had Ann Chinnis as one's physician; but the recompence is to have entry into her gorgeous poems. These are poems in full sail, with a poet of extraordinary powers at the tiller. Are they lyrics disguised as narratives, or narratives disguised as lyrics? The answer, most engagingly, is yes. What a balancing act, and what joy to have this gorgeous book in one's hands!

-Jeffrey Levine, artistic director and publisher, Tupelo Press