On Ann Chinnis’s Love Song: Port & Starboard (Kelsay Books, 2026)
“When we were young, we were told that poetry is about voice, about finding a voice and speaking with this voice, but the older I get I think it’s not about voice, it’s about listening and the art of listening, listening with attention. I don’t just mean with the ear; bringing the quality of attention to the world. The writers I like best are those who attend.”
—Kathleen Jamie
One of the great pleasures of Ann Chinnis’s Love Song: Port & Starboard is that it refuses almost every temptation contemporary poetry places before it. These poems do not hurry toward revelation. They do not convert experience into argument. They are remarkably uninterested in explaining themselves. Instead, they attend.
A mooring line. A hooked catfish. A tongue depressor. A crab trap. Oyster shells. A recipe card passed from one generation to the next. The humming brushes of a car wash. A dragonfly tattoo. A tube of lipstick lifted toward the face of a dying mother.
The poems trust the stuff of the world long before they trust ideas about them. That confidence is so much rarer than it first appears.
Roland Barthes wrote that certain details in a photograph wound us before we understand why. They possess a stubborn materiality that resists interpretation even as they quietly generate it. Ann Chinnis’s poems proceed in much the same way. Her images refuse to become symbols. A knot remains a knot. A suture remains a suture. A boat continues to answer to tide and weather before it ever begins speaking about marriage. The poems ask us to remain with the thing itself until feeling slowly gathers around it.
Perhaps this is why the collection possesses such unusual moral authority. Chinnis has spent decades as an emergency-room physician, but these are not, finally, physician poems. Nor are they chiefly poems about Chesapeake Bay, despite the marshes, tides, sailboats, and fishing grounds that continually surface. Medicine and water are not subjects here so much as ways of seeing. Both teach the same lesson: the world does not stay fixed. Bodies fail. Rivers flood. Lines loosen. Boats drift against their moorings. Everything worthy of love requires continual attention.
The opening poem, “Love Song: Port & Starboard,” appears at first to concern the mechanics of docking a sailboat. The speaker ties and unties ropes, adjusts for changing tides, struggles against shifting wind and current. Only gradually does another recognition emerge.
I need a second left hand
to snug that throw. I need you,
my love—my rock, my dock,
my cleat, my mooring.
It is a beautiful surprise, because the poem never abandons its maritime vocabulary. Marriage inherits the physics of docking rather than the language of romance. Love is not imagined as fusion or rescue. It is imagined as orientation—two people continually adjusting their bearings against forces neither entirely controls.
That word, orientation, begins to feel increasingly important as the book unfolds.
Chinnis returns often to acts that appear modest beside the dramas they accompany. Suturing a knife wound. Cleaning a fish. Pulling weeds. Cooking supper. Visiting a dying friend. Steering through bad weather. Nothing spectacular occurs. Yet everything depends upon these acts.
In “Why I Work the ER on Saturday Nights,” the physician recalls an uncle who stitched the torn mouth of a hooked catfish before releasing it back into the river. The story is almost unbelievable, yet it quietly names the ethical imagination governing the entire collection. It hardly matters that the fish—or the patient—will not live forever. The point is that repair remains meaningful even when permanence cannot be promised.
That distinction seems to me one of the book’s deepest achievements.
We have become accustomed to thinking of poetry in terms of healing. Healing suggests restoration, completion, the closing of wounds. Chinnis proposes something quieter and perhaps truer.
Repair.
Repair assumes imperfection from the beginning.
Repair knows that boats continue to weather, patients continue to die, marriages continue to require tending, friendships end too soon, memory frays. Repair makes no extravagant promises. It simply asks what faithfulness looks like after wholeness has become impossible.
This strikes me as an almost unwritten literary tradition.
Its members are not difficult to recognize once one begins looking for them.
Linda Greenlaw, who understands that a life at sea is sustained less by conquest than by endless acts of maintenance: nets mended, engines coaxed back to life, lines repaired before dawn.
Kathleen Jamie, who teaches herself to attend so completely to seabirds, stones, archaeological fragments, and weather that ordinary objects begin disclosing unsuspected forms of grace.
Ann Chinnis belongs among them.
Perhaps this is why hands become so strangely prominent throughout the collection.
The hand that ties the mooring line.
The hand that draws the suture.
The hand that frees the hooked fish.
The hand that steadies an aging parent.
The hand that smooths lipstick onto a dying mother’s face.
The hand that reaches beneath the car seat for a Corona after leaving hospice, raising it in a solitary toast while the brushes of the automatic wash beat softly against the windows in “Triple Foam.”
Only gradually does one recognize that these hands have been carrying the emotional argument of the book all along. Long before the poems speak of love, they practice it.
Toward the close of his life, Barthes became less interested in systems than in gestures. The great structuralist gradually gave way to the grieving son of Camera Lucida and the lover of A Lover’s Discourse. Love, he came to believe, survives less through declaration than through repetition: a pillow straightened before sleep, coffee prepared for another, a wrinkle noticed in a sleeve. These recurring acts formed what he called the “figures” of ordinary life—the small gestures by which affection continues after certainty has disappeared.
Ann Chinnis has written a book composed almost entirely of such figures.
Its true subject is not medicine.
Nor sailing.
Nor grief.
Its true subject is the mysterious work by which attention becomes devotion.
Seen this way, even the title begins to reveal another depth. Port and starboard are not sentimental words. They are words of orientation. They tell us how to keep our bearings when fog obscures the shoreline or darkness erases familiar landmarks. Chinnis’s poems perform precisely that service. Instead of rescuing us from grief, they orient us within grief’s compass.
Late in Camera Lucida, after the death of his mother, Barthes realizes that he is no longer searching for information about the beloved he has lost. He is searching for a way to inhabit her absence without betraying either memory or love. Chinnis’s poems undertake a remarkably similar labor. They understand that loss cannot be solved. It can only be accompanied—with another knot tied, another wound stitched, another meal prepared, another visit made before the light fails.
In an age captivated by transformation, Love Song: Port & Starboard reminds us that the deepest human work has never been transformation at all.
At first glance, the title Love Song seems almost startlingly conventional—a title that risks invoking one of lyric poetry’s oldest and most overworked abstractions. Yet Chinnis immediately unsettles that inheritance by pairing it with the practical vocabulary of navigation. Port and starboard rescues the phrase “love song” from the realm of declaration and return it to the realm of practice.
By the end of the collection, “love song” no longer means what we thought it meant when we read the cover. It means tying a mooring line, drawing a suture, cleaning a fish, carrying food to a friend, smoothing lipstick onto a dying mother’s face. The title itself has undergone repair.
By the final pages, one realizes that Chinnis has repaired the language of love itself. Love song, one of lyric poetry’s most inherited phrases, has become something almost startlingly literal: the music made by attention as it returns, day after day, to the ordinary work of keeping another person—and the world itself—from drifting away.