Customer Reviews

A Summer Evening (The Colorado Prize)

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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."

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.

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.

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 it 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."

This book of 83 poems, each about 10 lines long, exposes extraordinary emotional depth through beautiful craftsmanship. Nutter's sensitivity to imagery, his feel for the sound and taste of words, and his imaginiative genius set "A Summer Evening" above many first books. Playing with themes from simple to complex, these poems unfold their meanings in joyful layers upon subsequent readings, leaving me stunned. You'll enjoy this book of contemporary poetry.