The Night Path

By Laurie Kutchins

Book Overview

Winner, The Isabella Gardner Poetry Award For 1997

The poems of Laurie Kutchins take us down The Night Path, a trail that is not so much a place as it is a way of being acutely present in the moment. Patient and receptive, Kutchins crafts poems that see far into, and subsequently ennoble, all things corporeal, all things evanescent. Kutchins writes of pregnancy, birth and the complicated relationship between mother and child like no other contemporary American poet. In language both playful and sober, she mixes lyrics with narratives and dramatic monologues. In the poem, "Milk," the liquid itself speaks: "Given your birth, I am the glue of the cosmos. Love, I am/what you, puts you to sleep, keeps you going./I am fluid matter, essential as swallows/of air...So charged is my love, when I hear you cry I surge toward you like an electrical current." " A new vista opens in the poems Laurie Kutchins writes about pregnancy and birth. The are concrete and lyrical, factual and wildly speculative." Maxine Kumin

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1880238489
• ISBN13: 9781880238486
• Release Date: September 1997
• Publisher: BOA Editions
• Length: 96 Pages
• Weight: 0.69 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.2" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Strange, mystical, beautiful.

Kutchins explores the unknown region of understanding between a woman and the tissue forming itself inside her womb. As cell's divide and grow more complex, so does the poet's relationship with what is soon to become her son. The poems of growth, and ultimately separation, begin to illuminate her relationship with her own parents, the earth as living organism, the universe. A beautiful and meditative book about the natural cycle of life and death inherent even in the ultimate creative act of birth.