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A BUMPER CROP

New Poems

Don Gutteridge

Coming soon

In his compelling and intimate latest, Gutteridge turns his gaze toward love, memories, and the expansiveness of all that is life. Filled with vivid imagery and powerful emotion, the poems propel down the page with intense narrative energy, carrying the reader through a litany of emotions, including happiness, pain, longing as well as prolonged grief that refuses to go away (“If I were to try bringing you/ back, alive and loving/ as you were, the stars would wince/ displeasure, and the moon’s/ illume demur, for the grave/ is an ingratitudinous giver,”). With the detail-oriented eye of a novelist, Gutteridge brings people, places, and memories to life: “Every summer morning/ whether the sun simmered/ or not, Effie Free,/ five years old and counting,/ left home for a hop, skip/ and jump across the road.” Other poems offer elegant lyric description: “When I am seized by the full/ fury of a poem giving birth/ to itself, the words come not/ like a flood that drowns them/ till they utter, but rather as a/ sun-stroked rose/ bled backward to the bud.” Elsewhere, he writes about Alzheimer: “It’s nouns that go first,/ their rounded vowels softening/ at the centre, their cleaving consonants/ collapsed at the frayed hem/ of memory, and the objects out there/ they once nominated nicely,/ float free in the maelstrom.” These entries need to be read slowly to be best appreciated (“Whenever I think of the Romantics,/ penning their incendiary sallies/ to free mankind from the ballast/ of their bones and the maelstrom of their minds,/ I picture them thus:”).A poignant homage to all that’s life.

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