Eleanor Berry

Cape Ann and Beyond the Cut Bridge

Arts & Literature

“Color experienced as beauty gives comfort. Love of place is partly love of its characteristic colors (blue and green for Cape Ann), experienced as beautiful and thereby comforting. These underlying convictions animate the poems of Cape Ann and Beyond the Cut Bridge and the prose essays that frame them. Nearly two-thirds of the poems 'cull' Cape Ann, reflecting Sharon Chace's deep attachment to this far northeastern projection of Massachusetts, its tip almost cut off from the rest of the state by a river. The poet's visual imagination evokes it for the reader. The rest of the poems make forays down the Atlantic coast to Rhode Island, up into northern New England, west to Michigan, and far west to Arizona, Colorado, California, and Oregon. These are appreciative postcards, marveling notes, sent back home. Finally, it is the poet's visual imagination that brings the sights of western travel together with the daily ones of her eastern dwelling place--'Refreshed again by Eastern green, / Remembering the reds of the West.'”