Unexpected Light

The unexpected light in these poems is a certain sort of light: faint, slant, the light of twilight or a fading penlight or a barely discernible sliver of moon. Yet the poems pierce and burn. -Kate Bernadette Benedict, editor, Umbrella These poems, at once observational and prophetic, draw on the sometimes harrowing incisiveness of an empirical mind to produce an extraordinary vision. C.E. Chaffin is a poet of the body, but he is also a poet of conscience, a poet who infuses the lyric with a spiritual temperance born of experience. Here are words in service of integrity, poems in service of necessary revelations, and a poet in service of attention at its most elemental and unsettling." -- Seth Abramson, poet "These are poems which point both south toward anxiety and north toward hope, keeping the compass needle moving. C. E. Chaffin is a doctor with a physician's keen objective eye. His poems employ a music jazzed and melancholy, with a strong sense of dislocation and a painterly sensibility that resonate in the mind's optic." --Lynn Strongin, editor of "Sorrow Psalms" and "Crazed by the Sun" "Robinson Jeffers said, 'Pleasure is the carrot dangled to lead the ass to market; or the precipice.' The carrots are here. So are the precipices. Clean and spare, absent turgid image, these poems don't confound or perplex. Frankly they're too clever for that. The result of Chaffin's pointed observations is not clinical in any sterile sense, rather a dialectical body-lyric beyond, yet still beholden to, mere blood and bones. What we have here is a maturation of the soul." --from a review by Norman Ball