An Invocation of Fragments

The reader of Ted Charnley's An Invocation of Fragments will immediately be struck by three qualities present throughout this remarkable and consistently surprising collection: learning, wit and the mastery of craft. The allusions are multiplicitous and wide-ranging, and the array of forms - Sapphics, sonnets, villanelles, pantoums, rondeaus, to name only some - is dauntingly impressive. Moreover, it is as if the poet has taken to heart Keats' advice to Shelley and loaded "every rift with ore" - without being unduly dense, individual lines are freighted and packed with meaning. The "fragments" the poet feelingly invokes and that the reader discovers and savors here are those of Western Civilization itself, summoned and reflected upon by a well-stocked, curious and committed consciousness.

- Bruce Bennett, author of Just Another Day in Just Our Town

From Sappho, to Groucho, to an eighteen-year-old in his muscle car, to a father lamenting his daughter's beauty that will no doubt hasten her leaving the nest, these poems gather together a rich collection of people. Whether heroes and villains of history, myth and literature, or ordinary folks living everyday lives, Ted Charnley brings them alive by speaking not just about them but also to them and through them. Many poems, some in traditional forms, skillfully employ techniques such as meter, rhyme and alliteration. Vivid personas, combined with dense, textured descriptions and creative renderings of social conscience, make this book a delight to read.

- Beth Houston, editor of Rhizome Press.

An Invocation of Fragments showcases Ted Charnley's talent for matching poetic form to subject. He uses the accentual, alliterative prosody of the Anglo-Saxons to depict an aged but still-sturdy barn. For his love song to New Orleans - one that refuses to flatter the beloved - he chooses common meter. To describe the dance macabre of the nurses who make their rounds tending to contagious Covid-stricken patients, he writes a rondeau. He makes the repetend of "The Rape of Proserpina" what the celebrated sculptor Bernini said of his model, on whom he forced himself: "I have given her no voice." Having chosen the clarifying, difficult work of writing formal verse, Charnley allows a gravedigger to speak for him: "What's hard on the hands frees up the head."

- Alfred Nicol, author of Animal Psalms