Music, Art, Mortality – a review of Sue Chenette’s Clavier, Paris, Alyssum Reviewed by Louise Carson I was wrong. Whether the dog got antsy sooner because we’d slept in after staying up late to see the answer to the question: how long does it take conservatives to extract leadership ballots from torn envelopes? (A sentence I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised to write considering how fraught even the simplest tasks have become in these times of Trump, crises of COVID.) Or was it because I got sucked in and slowed down by Chenette’s seductive poetry and spent more time reading each work. We’ll never know. The epigraph which fronts the Paris section should have warned me – the one about Paris being “loath to surrender itself to people who are in a hurry.” Tell it to my dog.
I must have been feeling a bit rebellious the morning I picked up Sue Chenette’s recent collection Clavier, Paris, Alyssum, and, reading out of order (shocking!), began with the central section: Paris. Mainly because I saw it was the shortest of the book’s three sections, a mere thirteen pages. Good, I thought, I’ll be able to check this out before the dog gets antsy for her walk.
Anyway, I read the first poem, ‘Charles-Louis Clérisseau Defends His Architectural Fantasy; and I Respond’ and thought ‘Oh, goody! History as well as geography’, with the poet’s brief gentle ending softening those two dryer subjects. With her, we get to witness great works of art. In ‘Lalique’s Poppies’ Chenette traces the construction of a brooch from the artist lying in a field of poppies to the final “Bur-
