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(More customer reviews)As much as anyone I know of in the small press, Jim Chandler has paid his dues. Chandler has operated as a kind of southern Bukowski since the early 70's when his work began to appear in magazines and literary journals around the country.
SMOKE AND THUNDER delivers a large sample of his powerful,often raw, yet more often elegant poetry. Chandler moves easily from narrative to elegy to the occasional rant, bearing the reader along with a lyrical sense that is not bound by structure or literary convention.
Chandler best describes himself as a survivalist in his aptly titled "hillbilly rasputin:"
i know now
i go on
i will go on
i cannot
be stopped
by death
the hole
or anything
i am eternal
fire
clutching what
i know
holding it
to heart.
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If you're a fan of 'moon, spoon, June' poetry, Smoke & Thunder is not for you. There are no sweet rhymes to be found inside these pages, no saccharine poetics spouted strictly for the sake of linguistic beauty. The free verse here, however lyrical at times, rides the hard edge of the road, having issued from the brain of a man who has pushed himself to dangerous extremes more times than he cares to recall, but always survived for the recounting, torn and tattered though he may have been. Many of the poems here are brutal and unrelenting, rife with tragedy and anger, but always honest to a fault. And yet the true heart of the poet shows through, as in the memorial poem for his father and poems about his grandparents.Whether over coffee in a restaurant with his peers, or passing a bottle of wine around a burn barrel at a junkyard, this poet's home is the world. The more than one hundred poems in Smoke & Thunder, most of which were written during the past two decades, represent a small part of a lifetime's work for a man past 60.
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