by Joseph Hutchison

108 Pages, 5½ x 8½

Library of Congress Control Number:  2021935193

ISBN:  978-1-63045-074-8

Publication Date:  09/01/2021

Press Release

HD Cover for Reviews

Cover Art:  Skeltz 1: Heart
by John Ransom  | www.johnransomla.com

   

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The road a poet travels is often littered with unrealized fragments, half-realized drafts, and unfinished poems that found their ways into a magazine but never earned their way into a book. If a poet is lucky, a few of such left-behinds might be “rescued,” released into their true form thanks to abilities that have ripened over many years of practice. In Under Sleep’s New Moon, Joseph Hutchison (Colorado Poet Laureate, 2014-2019) offers a range of such poems, all rescued from twenty years of writing between 1970-1990. The poems in this new/old collection are by turns personal and public, surreal and naturalistic, musical and plain-spoken. But all explore the liminal regions we live in every day, too often unconscious of what we’re finding there. What this poet found there he has lifted into new configurations, where at last the poems can speak for themselves.

Recommendations

Not just rescued poems from Under Sleep's New Moon, but a sustained radiance and thrall that continues to rescue language and the natural world from the maw of capitalism:

Snowmelt trickles,
                         spills
from the tundra moss
to bracken,
                   growing
gabby, lusty...

His voice "tries on color after color," pushing toward an aura we all need in today's heartless weather." I've been admiring Hutchison's poems for over thirty years, and I'm so glad he took these out from under his magic hat.

—Mark Irwin, author of Shimmer, winner of the 2018 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry

How could our world be anything but blessed by work that bends "...under the beauty of seeing / clearly, seeing whole?" How could we not rejoice at these poems "bowing / in pain and joy. Bearing / the difficult witness?" Praise to Joe Hutchison for retrieving these early poems and then giving them to us. This reader bows in gratitude to him for his deeply palpable imagery, his arresting and resonant insights. Full of wonderment and wisdom, these poems invite us to hear, up close, "the unraveling palaver of our hearts."

—Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita

The resonance established between visual and aural perception is uniquely powerful in Joseph Hutchison's work. In poem after poem of this superb volume, the crisp visions which intrude in the middle of daily life trigger what he in one poem refers to as "a musical phrase" which fills the eye in the back of the head with "complex electrical activity giving rise to a windchime shiver of feeling." What a wonderful description of poetry at its best...poetry that gives rise to growth of emotion and feeling and comprehension that transcends the linear thoughts of technology and progress. This is a poetry that brings us back to "the endless entanglement of the bitter and the sweet," allowing us to see once again with "the Ancient Light," and walk once more "hip-deep in deity."

—Jared Smith, author of That's How It Is

These "rescued" poems by Joseph Hutchison bear a lyrical and "difficult witness" to the outer and the inner world as we know it. Fueled by keen observation, "restless shadows," compassion, wonder, and a "cadence that rocks us," this is a collection both expansive and intimate. Here we have a poet's honest and memorable voyage into the "endless entanglement of the bitter and the sweet."

—Wendy Videlock, author of Nevertheless