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Open Books: Events
April 15, 2008 07:30 PM
SUSAN HUTTON
We wrote about Susan Hutton’s inaugural collection, On the Vanishing of Large Creatures ($14.95 Carnegie Mellon), when it first arrived last year, and now we have the opportunity to hear her read from it. As we said then, her deeply humane poems are a fine addition to the American lyric tradition. The domestic -- marriage, children, family and friends -- provides the book's cloth, a realistic and unromantic domes- ticity presented with intelligence and kindness. Yet stitched throughout is the larger world, its strange facts, both sorrowful and beautiful, its echoing history and unknowable future -- “Michelangelo, painting the Sistine Chapel, finished eventually and went home. / But that fervor must be somewhere.” Persistence and evanescence, those mysteriously joined elements of life, repeatedly draw her attention, and she views them with equanimity -- “We were at our most poignant, and we were commonplace.” That, the poems suggest, is something to mourn, something to praise.
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