Review by Booklist Review
Selected by Carl Phillips, author most recently of Silverchest (2013), as the recipient of the Yale Younger Poets Prize, Schutt's debut investigates death, life, and language with the intimate precision of a painter's attention to a still life. From the lambent apricot of an oddly warm dawn in January to purple bargain chiffon, Schutt renders physicality with delicate intensity and exquisite simile: a museumgoer, learning of religious unrest in Egypt, slides a newspaper into his pocket like a curved blade in a sheath. As a kind of intermission between the book's major movements, Schutt inserts translations of renowned Italian poets, including the twentieth-century masters Eugenio Montale and Edoardo Sanguineti. Schutt also includes allusions to both Elizabeth Bishop and Walt Whitman but does well not to sentimentalize his literary heritage. Rather, the poems seek to accept the passage of time, the change of tide. The past, one speaker admits, appears clearly, riddled with wrong measurements. In this way, Schutt's work moves west, toward death, toward the Occident, both collapsing, one into the other.--Baez, Diego Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The latest winner of the venerable Yale Younger Poets Prize turns out to be terse, well-traveled, resolutely unfashionable, and, finally, wise. Westerly is a town in Rhode Island, "where nirvana is a long time/ coming... the way stupid hope won't shut up"; it's also a direction for American history, for personal migration ("you find yourself relieved/ your world is set in the Midwest// and facts belong to this poem"), for the roaming imagination, where "Not everyone who dreams dreams the beach." Schutt yokes such pithy phrases to a gift for describing real places, and to a gift for memory: his longest, most painstaking poem commemorates a friend who died at 23. "Sometimes you turn to poetry/ the way you turn to another country," an unrhymed sonnet begins, and Schutt can turn to other countries, too, with translations from modern Italian, including Montale; they sound like poems in English, and they sound continuous with the alert, serious, respectful life Schutt reveals. "Just once I'd like to end up/ on the other side of gravity," he speculates, but his gravity-his seriousness-is one more gift; like Dan Chiasson or Jessica Greenbaum, he ends up at once contemporary, "confessional," and quietly traditional. His debut (selected by Carl Phillips) can seem too short, but everything in it heralds a seriously important career. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
