May 24, 2013
Lizzie Hutton
continued
by poets working in Ann Arbor and has now added a small wonder to the list. She'd Waited Millennia, by Lizzie Hutton, is a memorable first book built around a strong ear for the musicality of language, an eye for the vivid remembered detail of childhood, and a willingness to come to admirable philosophic conclusions about experience.
Hutton starts her book by re-creating the glorious solipsism of childhood. Early on she writes:
The inflexible language of girlhood, see, combinedAs promising as this hard self-knowledge is, Hutton is certainly not content to stay in it. She can write wonderful poems about a first sexual encounter--and, particularly, poems that turn on startling and troubling images from what appear to have been some childhood time spent in India--but she certainly isn't content to stay in the past. Thoughts and images about her marriage and her children are always ready to take the poet and her readers out of the individual experience and connect with the larger shared experience of the world.
with my various shynesses, meant
my insides seemed profounder that anything I'd do--
it seemed I'd done enough just by having been invented
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