A Summer Evening (The Colorado Prize) [Paperback]

Geoffrey Nutter (Author)

Book Description

Series: The Colorado Prize | Publication Date: October 1, 2001

Winner of the 2001 Colorado Prize for Poetry.

Published by the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A Summer Evening urgently and beautifully explores conflicting circular and linear sensations of time. Embodying that dismembering dichotomy in undated digital time-markers—thus refusing to indicate whether we are, at any given moment, moving forward or backward—it compels us to leap to increasingly vertigo-laden temporal assumptions that, like some fraying net, tighten to temporarily hold narrative, then rip it ‘free.’ One ends up in the presence of a terrifying—yet also strangely liberating—universe where one cannot tell whether one is indeed progressing on a ‘journey of life’ . . . or whether one is locked in some mock-time in which accountability cannot be acted upon, but in which it still presses, demanding redress. While all along, at the core, almost madly, song continues . . ." -- Jorie Graham, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974–1994

"This is a stimulating, thoughtful, unusual work that is worthy of the accolades and prizes it is receiving." --Tulsa World

About the Author

Geoffrey NutterÂ’s poems have appeared in such magazines as American Letters and Commentary, Chicago Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Fine Madness, Fence, The Iowa Review, Verse, Volt, and Best American Poetry 1997.

Product Details

• Paperback: 90 pages
• Publisher: Center for Literary Publishing (October 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1885635028
• ISBN-13: 978-1885635020
• Product Dimensions: 7.4 x 6.7 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,316,964 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This Book Will Kill You, January 4, 2003

By 

Sandy Brown (Muncie, Indiana, U.S.A.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Summer Evening (The Colorado Prize) (Paperback)

A truly great book of poetry leaves me with few ways to speak about it except to say, "Read the book." Still have questions? Read the book again. It's like when you are on a bus in a town that is not your home and you overhear a stranger, who is just getting out, utter to someone who is not you the exact words you have been searching for all your life to describe the one thought and feeling you've been having for all of your life but have been unable to even formulate much less articulate in any way, ever. The bus pulls back into traffic, and you're like, "Wait," but the moment has passed, and you can't remember the words when you go to tell somebody else what you just heard. That's "A Summer Evening."

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a mysterious and singular little book, November 13, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: A Summer Evening (The Colorado Prize) (Paperback)

This is a mysterious and singular little book. The poetry inside is neither "hard" nor "easy". Each 10-line poem has its own logic, and also relates in dreamlike ways to its bookmates. It reminds me of reading the Tao Te Ching, where one can find in every handful of lines both vexation and inspiration. You can amuse or stump yourself trying to untangle each little 10-line knot. Or you can just open the book at random and be taken to a specific, inexplicable spot that is the intersection of a memory, a mood, a place, a season, a smell, a thought, a history.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars an endless summer, November 3, 2002

By 

Reginald Shepherd (Pensacola, FL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Summer Evening (The Colorado Prize) (Paperback)

A Summer Evening creates a world of interlinked linguistic and imagistic elements that weave their way in and out of the individual poems, evoking a sense both of momentum and of a motionless eternity, a world turning and yet utterly still: "Because I can find no fault can this be named Paradise." Each poem represents a moment in time, and yet there is no progression, only succession: this summer evening is infinite, and can be entered or exited at any instant. Each of the end-stopped lines (largely declaratives, asserting "This is so"-as one line goes, "You said, `This exists,' you knew it existed") is both a complete poem in itself, a kind of occidental haiku--"In the evening the sun is a scientist," "The sky says Yes by landing in the tree," "The world is not round, it is more beautiful than that, a kind of blue gas," "Deep down, some predators may generate a purple light to hunt by"--and one of the building blocks of larger poetic units. As readers, we participate in the assembling of the poem, and in each poem's process of constructing the book's two sections ("A Summer Evening" and "Ming") and finally of the book as a whole, which is both a collection of poems and a single long, potentially unendingly ongoing poem.