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GILDING THE LILY

New Poems: 2023

Don Gutteridge

Coming soon

Gutteridge returns to his favorite themes and places, exploring love, life, and death in his affecting latest collection. These poems delve into subjects of life, mortality, pain, happiness, loneliness, and intimacy, exhibiting how memories, be it painful, sad, wonderful or joyful, make for an essential part of our lives. The book renders the joys and passions of boyhood, the pain of loss, the indelible marks of grief, and the experience of all-consuming love: “Come Christmas, we spend/ our first days apart/ since the daily commutes to school began, and already I miss/ the vellum of your voice and the way/ you smile quietly with your eyes.” Many of these poems evoke surrealist details: “O how you loved your music!/ Friday nights in the student pews of Massey Hall,/ humming along with Brahms/ or Beethoven, or sighing aloft/ to Tosca’s dying diminuendo,/ and it was you who introduced me/ to Ella and Leadbelly’s basso/ bravura.” At other times, he details boyhood shenanigans and passions: “I might’ve been thirteen, no more,/ when the sight of a girlish curl,/ napping on a nape, or the telltale/ swell of a buttoned blouse/ aroused in me feelings/ that growled in the groin and stiffened/ my resolve.” Out of happiness, pain and loss, enduring love, childhood longings, and old memories, Gutteridge constructs a poignant imagery that is vivid and brilliantly conveyed.

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