To Be the Daylight

Charlotte Mandel's humane and lyrical vision is exuberant with image after surprising image, each one as precise as mathematics-incontrovertible, as if foretold. -Cynthia Ozick Such exquisite poetry and passionate vision as are found in Charlotte Mandel's new collection, To Be the Daylight, take a lifetime to achieve. Always an engaged poet, Mandel writes austerely in lament of a citizen's inability to affect a new government's decision to go to war-"Lines to power/ cut." As a whole, however, the book sings in stunning formal splendor of a life rich in love and joy, of life on earth and its richness, what she calls in one poem the "generosities of daylight," and in her boldly revisionary and deeply philosophical sonnet crown, "The Waiting Room," a frontier "bounded by water, sky, rock and earth: / time a] space you inhabit from birth." To Be the Daylight shines with the light of this marvelous poet's generous wisdom -Cynthia Hogue, author of In June the Labyrinth Charlotte Mandel likes to mix it up. She makes happy bedfellows of love and science, mingles the historical with the personal, and celebrates birth and babies as she contemplates death. She's also equally comfortable with traditional and contemporary forms. Sonnets and sonnet crowns, rimas dissolutas, and rhymed quatrains reside amiably alongside poems in free verse-skinny poems, fat prose poems, and poems without punctuation. Whether we are back in Coney Island, Ebbets Field, or a Brooklyn post office, whether we are confronted with the body's betrayals or its blessings, its persistence, its ability to keep on ticking, we are always aware that this is a poet who has earned her place among poets, who knows what she's doing and does it exceptionally well. -Diane Lockward, editor of The Crafty Poet II: A Portable Workshop Praise for Charlotte Mandel's previous book Life Work: Our complex lives are richer for the clear beautiful eye of Charlotte Mandel. She grasps us out of our wilderness to say look at this truth, how language retrieves us from turmoil. -Grace Cavalieri, The Washington Independent Review of Books.