Publications

To Be The Daylight (Kelsay Books)

"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

Through A Garden Gate (David Robert Books)

“This book is absolutely beautiful. Vincent Covello's photography is exquisite and Charlotte Mandel’s poetry is sublime. A treasure of garden beauty and poetic genius.””
 —  Sander Zulauf, Poet, Editor Emeritus of Journal of New Jersey Poets.

"The Vincent Covello-Charlotte Mandel photography-poetry collaboration is a striking success. So many of the painterly scenes of  the seasons as they arrive and depart inspire graceful and pensive poems. I've marked out 'August Heat' for its verbal music, how well it accompanies the burnt strokes of the grass, and the terse beauty of 'Japanese fountain,' the perfection of form and the bravura of 'October Speaks,' how the poem catches both the color and agitation of autumn and then the contrasting somber notes of winter's waiting time as Mandel closes her meditation. There are so many of these delights.”
 —  Colette Inez

Life Work (David Robert Books)

"It is Mandel’s poems on her husband’s death I will remember above all this year for elegance and restraint.  She chooses formal diction in verse to achieve a firm focus while allowing gifted flexibility within the lines.  Our complex lives are richer for the clear beautiful eye of Charlotte Mandel--whether writing about a new sweater for an aged father or an estranged brother’s death, she grasps us out of our wilderness to say look at this truth, how language retrieves us from turmoil.”
 —  Reviewed by Grace Cavalieri in The Washington Independent Review of Books.

“In LIFE WORK, Charlotte Mandel reaffirms that rhythms, repetitions, and rituals sustain us. If there is a loss in that, there is also profound and quiet joy.
 —  Kim Bridgford

“These are graceful, wise, and courageous poems. In Charlotte Mandel’s LIFE WORK, poetry is a help both during trouble and in the quiet after, helping us to figure out what we feel and challenging us to say it.”
 —  Rachel Hadas

"In her book Life Work, Charlotte Mandel teaches us a thing or two about living —that is, if we have ears to hear.” 
 —  Athena Kildegaard 
Read the full review in Portage Magazine:
http://portagemagazine.org/life-work-by-charlotte-mandel/

Rock, Vein, Sky (Midmarch Arts Press)

“Here is a poet steeped in the clarity of memory, who dares to link public brutality with the searingly counter intuitive, who can speak of a ’vaccine to prevent/sweetness in the tastes of war,’ who can invent words powerful enough to outrun the times.”
 —  Cynthia Ozick

“Charlotte Mandel’s poems present close observation in moments of illuminating insight, poems as much felt as imagined, organic, “given” in the best sense. They are a welcome gift.”
 —  Sam Hamill

“What quickly strikes one about Charlotte Mandel’s seventh collection of poems - the resonantly, imagistically entitled Rock Vein Sky - is the depth of response in the work.”
Read the full review by Cynthia Hogue here
http://thecollagist.com/the-collagist/2010/4/14/rock-vein-sky-by-charlotte-mandel.html

“ . . .poem after poem tracks twenty-first century calamities. She focuses on the persistence of love despite disaster in every case, particularly the bonds between parents and children.” Read the full review by Lesley Wheeler here http://www.valpo.edu/vpr/wheelerreviewmandel.html

“Charlotte Mandel’s seventh collection of poetry, Rock Vein Sky, ...offers the reader a provocative portrait of the moments that comprise a life. . .” Read the full review by Kara Candito in the January 2010 issue Poet’s Quarterly

Sight Lines (Midmarch Arts Press)

"Charlotte Mandel presses down on ’the holding pedal of memory’ preserving for us a World War II childhood, events of a long marriage, and domestic and foreign scenes that combine the common-place and the bizarre in crisp and lucid language.” - Maxine Kumin

“A wordsmith of wisdom and exuberance, Charlotte Mandel brings daily life to fresh meaning in this new book. Vivid her vocabulary and exhilarating her synesthetic senses . . . Here is poetry for which we must all be grateful.”
- F. D. Reeve

The Marriages of Jacob, a poem-novella (Micah Publications)

“This is really beautiful poetry, original in conception and sustained in execution. It feels sacred through and through, although with no sense of piety. Charlotte Mandel’s poem-novella is lyric, substantial, authentic.” - Alicia Ostriker

“A rich tapestry of biblical lore comes alive in fine, vigorous language. Erotic and sensual in parts, the poem-novella is seamless, with authority in detail, and power in the musical surge of its rhythms.” - Colette Inez

“The reader can only marvel at Charlotte Mandel’s vivid images and musical narrative.” - Independent Publisher

The Life of Mary, a poem-novella; book and audiotape of author reading the entire work with musical accompaniment by composer-guitarist David Hauer  (Saturday Press)

“Ambitious and poignant, Mandel’s long poem mediates beautifully between the ’great time’ in which divine, mythic events occur and the ongoing, historical time in which we all live. . . That Mandel is telling a story through a sequence of lyrics is fascinating. . . locating herself in a female -- indeed, often consciously feminist -- tradition of revisionary mythology. Parent, child, poet, and reader: all will be moved by this extraordinary text.” - Sandra M. Gilbert

Keeping Him Alive

“A fine elegiac sequence, continuously touching, continuously well done, sensitive and clear.” - Hayden Carruth

A Disc of Clear Water

“I like the human quality of these poems, the way they come to earth, and also step forward.” - Robert Bly

“. . . offers new and at times shattering insights into the relation between mothers and daughters.” - Library Journal

“. . . makes the earth blossom, the bread rise . . . Charlotte Mandel is an observer, a diviner, she’s an ordinary woman passionately in touch with extraordinary realities of everyday life.” - Carol Muske-Dukes

Doll

“A book of immaculate precision, every word an exact cup.”
- Cynthia Ozick

Saturday’s Women

An anthology of poems by finalists in the Eileen W. Barnes Award contest to publish a first book by a woman poet over 40. Edited and with Introduction by Charlotte Mandel; co-edited Maxine Silverman and Rachel Hadas.

“Impressive in its breadth, gratifying in its strength, this anthology is a storehouse of necessary poems written by women and addressed to the world.” - Maxine Kumin