Cape Ann and Beyond the Cut Bridge

My poems are about places on Cape Ann, in the wider world, and in interior places of mind and heart. I often write poetry about beauty as revelatory of transcendent meanings in nature, community, and intuitions of the divine. The introduction reveals my literary and religious connections to Lucy Larcom, a nineteenth-century writer who is most famous for her book of prose, A New England Girlhood Outlined from Memory and her book of poetry, Wild Roses of Cape Ann. For both my historical soul sister and for me, beauty is sacramental, signaling the Creator in creation. Beauty is beatitude infused. I invite you to contemplate with me. Perhaps our paths will converge. It is my hope that you will discover challenge, comfort, and even joy.

""Part philosopher, part poet, part image maker, writer Sharon Chace captures small-town life with a perceptive eye and a light touch. Cape Ann and Beyond the Cut Bridge is a veritable Whitman's Sampler for the mind, a treat you will go back to time and again, each page offering a different delight.""
--Suellen Wedmore, Poet Laureate emerita, Rockport, MA

""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.'""
--Eleanor Berry, President, National Federation of State Poetry Societies, Lyons, OR



Sharon R. Chace is the author of Portfolio of Painterly Poems: A Pilgrim's Path to God (2006), An Artistic Approach to New Testament Literature (2008), Protestant Pulse: Heart Hopes for God (2009), My First Introduction to the New Testament (2011), and Images of Light: Ascent to Trust in Triumph (2013). She continues to write poetry and paints comforting images for people in hospice care.