Chameleon Hours

- Contents
- Review Quotes

ONE
Everglades
Two Scenes from Philadelphia
1959
Group Portrait
The Artist’s House
In the Barn
Thirteen
Two Monuments
First Death
Miss Peters
Mia’s House
Supermarket Scanner
Temp
For a Father
Elegy
The Secret House
Caught
One Calvinist’s God
Plague
TWO
Gnomic Verses from the Anglo-Saxon
Four Lectures by Robert Lowell
Sisyphus: The Sequel
Philosophical Arguments
Depends on the Angle
Insights
As I Was Saying
Arcadia
Rural Route
Dislocations
Song: The Messenger
The Book of Steve
August
Buying the Farm
THREE
Cancer Surgery
Prognosis: 50-50
A Valediction
Room 238: Old Woman and Hummingbird
Chemo Side Effects: Memory
Chemo Side Effects: Vision
Childless
Forty-Eight Years
Granted a Stay
First Days Back at Work
Chameleon Hours
Ways of Going
Farewell Desires
FOUR
Home Is the Sailor
For Jenny
The Runt Lily
Since I Last Saw You
FIVE
World War II Watchtower
Crux
Pauper, Boston
Vuillard Interior
Where Your Treasure Is
US Post Office, December 22
Two Cowboys
Ruin
Heron, Tampa
Tested
Epitaph for Diane
Edwin Partridge
Snail Halfway Across the Road
From Festes’s Self-Help Book
Unknown Artists
Phoenix
Snapshots of Our Afterlife
Small Vessel
Notes
“In their ample, embracing, nuanced appetite for sensory experience, [Partridge’s] poems achieve an ardent, compassionate and unsentimental vision.”
“Partridge’s impressive poems pursue a careful thinker’s yearning for abandon, a loyal friend and partner’s wish for change. Attentive to fact, to what she sees and knows, Partridge nonetheless makes space for what is wild, outside and within us—for the fears and the blanks of chemotherapy, for sharp variations within (and without) frames of metre and rhyme, and for the welcome consistencies of married love. She has learned detail-work, and patience, from Elizabeth Bishop, but she has made other virtues her own: riffs on familiar phrases open startling vistas and even her love poems get attractively practical. Hers is a welcome invitation: let’s listen in.”
“Reading Chameleon Hours, I find myself marveling at the luck of each heron, mosquito, field of Queen Anne’s Lace, each person, place, thing or circumstance in this beautiful book, to have Elise Partridge’s exquisite and precise attention. And how lucky we are to get to listen in as she offers each of them her flawless ear; the book is full of understated sonic gems like ‘a kickball straight into pink lilac.’ In ‘Chemo Side Effects: Memory,’ after describing ‘groping in the thicket’ for ‘the word I want . . . scrabbling like a squirrel on the oak’s far side,’ she tells us ‘I could always pull the gift / from the lucky-dip barrel; scoop the right jewel / from my dragon’s trove. . . .’ We of course already know this. It’s evident in every one of these poems.”
“Elise Partridge is a poet of brilliant precisions. Each line presents a new, glinting angle of thought. Whether she’s contemplating relics of World War II, or a mosquito struggling in a spider web like ‘a fast-forward Rockette,’ or shirts spinning in a dryer, their arms flailing, Partridge’s coolly surprising intelligence rediscovers the worlds she remakes in words. These poems—good, tangy and chunky on the tongue—somehow reflect life’s plenitude while maintaining their own spareness and balance. The result is an art of eerie compassion and an almost hyper-realist perception of the small, like the snail seen rippling and gliding its way across a paved road: ‘Bow sprit-antennae plunge, rise:/ safety’s ten lifetimes ahead.’”
Literature and Literary Criticism: American and Canadian Literature
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