The Night Path
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
New Moon, End of October
Morning met the grass in whiteness
white sparks, chalk and
bone.
noon was a gristle of crickets.
dusk was black leaf smoke, quick, then dark,
star-still, darker
still.
© BOA Editions, Ltd 1997
Cloth - Signed Edition ISBN: 1-880238-48-9
Price: $35.00
Publishing Date: January 1997
From $12.50
