In Janet Trenchard’s first collection, Infrared, the poems survey a crumbling past sifted through memory and imagination, a kaleidoscope where at every turn a new pattern is revealed, a new perspective falls into place. Trenchard pairs her artist’s keen eye with equal attention to language’s music and rhythm to create an at times haunting collection where goddesses and gods walk among us, mere mortals rise from ashes, and where that which falls apart finds shape and meaning once more. Unforgettable.
Sally Ashton, Santa Clara County Poet Laureate (2011-2013), Editor-in-Chief of DMQ Review, author of three poetry collections, most recently Some Odd Afternoon.
These musical poems traverse a landscape of human encounters, some domestic, others alcohol-soaked, all compelling. In “Night Owls,” two friends drink the night away as a dark presence hangs over them: “it was enough to know / that it could be owls / calling to me through whiskey.” In “Wedgewood Stove,” a woman sits in her kitchen, the scene set for a quiet evening, but the “cracked patio” and “hole in the sky / with light raining down” suggest otherwise. In “Sparks,” a mattress burns for days, the energy “waiting to burst out / like so many red bees.” These poems illuminate the unexpected links in life and love.
Erica Goss, Los Gatos, CA. Poet Laureate Emerita
Infrared is a luminous book. Like the artist she also is, Janet Trenchard paints with words, as in her opening poem, Spirits: “I need the color amber in the palm of my hand…” Words emerge “as trumpets summoned up/from underground that dark gold/that everything is made of”. Poems of smoke, night owls, scarab beetles, or a weekend at God’s, are painted with an imagistic brush. Here, too, is an old Wedgewood stove lighting a table that holds, like Janet’s poems, a book filled with whale posters, a clawfoot tub, Nina Simone on the stereo. One is drawn in, as in her final lines, as “angels in the Torah bending over/each blade of grass”.
Dane Cervine, author of “How Therapists Dance”, and, “The Jeweled Net of Indra”
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