The Night Path (American Poets Continuum) - Hardcover

Kutchins, Laurie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1880238489 ISBN 13: 9781880238486

Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd., 1997

Synopsis

Winner, The Isabella Gardner Poetry Award For 1997

The poems of Laurie Kutchins take us down The Night Path, a trail that is not so much a place as it is a way of being acutely present in the moment. Patient and receptive, Kutchins crafts poems that see far into, and subsequently ennoble, all things corporeal, all things evanescent. Kutchins writes of pregnancy, birth and the complicated relationship between mother and child like no other contemporary American poet. In language both playful and sober, she mixes lyrics with narratives and dramatic monologues. In the poem, "Milk," the liquid itself speaks: "Given your birth, I am the glue of the cosmos. Love, I am/what you, puts you to sleep, keeps you going./I am fluid matter, essential as swallows/of air...So charged is my love, when I hear you cry I surge toward you like an electrical current." " A new vista opens in the poems Laurie Kutchins writes about pregnancy and birth. The are concrete and lyrical, factual and wildly speculative." Maxine Kumin

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Reviews

This collection of poems, winner of the 1997 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, will be a blessing to everyone who enjoys poetry and has parented a child or may do so someday. Kutchins writes with grace primarily about pregnancy, childbirth, and tending a newborn. Her poems explore the depths of early motherhood, but not all the poems are concerned with maternity. The poet walks with her mother in a seamy part of New York City, comes to terms with her father's cancer, witnesses a traffic fatality, swims in a swift river that is "white as ash and boiling." But the thread that links these poems is the creation of new life: "Little night tapper, my dreamer and my dream,/ my bones will soon turn to water/ for you." The poems are not arranged chronologically, which is initially disturbing (for example, poems about pregnancy follow poems about breastfeeding). But the book carries its own rhythm, and the "order" matters less and less as the reader moves through it. Kutchins is a poet who questions: "How long did I overlook November?" "What is it like to live without a future?" "Who is he, this stranger pulled from me?" Hers is not a closed world of certainty but an open world of great mystery. This is a poet who matters.?Judy Clarence, California State Univ. Lib., Hayward
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1880238489
• ISBN 13: 9781880238486
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 96