Book Release: The Commonwealth by Dan Rattelle

We are excited to announce the release of Dan Rattelle’s new chapbook, The Commonwealth. Written, in large part, during his time studying in St Andrews, Scotland with the poet Don Patterson, The Commonwealth looks across the sea toward Rattelle’s home of Massachusetts for inspiration. The craftsman and craftsmanship that remains in our technological age provides ink for Rattelle’s pen as he considers tools, homes, birds, trees, and the losses and gains of men and women in communities weighed down and enlivened by the ghosts of the past. Readers of the Poets’ Corner will recall Rattelle’s skill as a poet from poems such as “Postscript: At the Ruins of St Mary on the Rocks” and “The Bookcase.” The title poem from The Commonwealth appeared earlier this week and gives a good impression of the merits of this chapbook.

Dan Rattelle is an MFA student at the University of St Andrews. His poems and reviews have recently been published or are forthcoming in Modern Age, FORMA, Alabama Literary Review, and First Things. He lives in Massachusetts.

“These poems are noteworthy for their compact, evocative descriptions, their formal command of both free verse and traditional meters, and the telling insights conveyed by their measured, conversational tone.”

–Robert B. Shaw

“This volume is aptly titled. These poems engage with human community – bonds of marriage, family, friendship, history – and rituals of labor and leisure that define and nurture a vision of shared human good.”

-Sally Thomas, author of Motherland

“In an age in which we have all but lost the ability to see the extraordinary beauty of ordinary, “deep down things,” it falls to the poet to make the familiar strange so that we may see the world as it truly is. In The Commonwealth, Rattelle does just that. Here the quotidian and monotonous becomes exotic and alluring. In these poems, we are struck with the dearest freshness of everyday life.”

–J. Brandon Meeks, author of The Foolishness of God