01/07/2025
RELEASE DAY!
A slim chapbook offering from former Poet Laureate of Colorado, Joseph Hutchison.
Available at Books.by and Amazon.com now.
Also there is an interview of Joseph by Kathryn Winograd in our bio’s Linktree that was just published.
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In Cliff Swallows at Mesa Verde, Joe Hutchison ask Winter not to wake up, although we can feel it dreaming in hiding—dreaming in the denned fox, in the dark-swaddled seeds and also in us. But these are also poems about how these things are also part of life, part of “a dreaming on which time itself is made.” The poems in this chapbook live the seasons verses naming them. Griefs large and little, personal and universal. The wonder of the world breath that becomes ours but will also slip back into the world’s breath— “Thin fire flickers in the nest of old news”—and in between those bookends, we who look and listen to both beauty and the shadow nature embodies, learn to define ourselves with the language of nature— “Thin fire flickers in the nest of old news.
There is the double exposure of the veteran’s experience —a kind of haiku of tragedy—in the return home, and the length of healing for wounds of depth. There are rituals of light wherein we place our love and our loved ones— “You blink, and they’re gone”— and by which we solemnly wonder at the richness of the world we might not know without having been the ones to survive somehow—“The kindling catches,/ and as always, intimations of renewal/ glint in your eyes, flaring for an instant” and how the life of the individual is both contrasted with and beautifully enfolded into that eternality of spirit, song, joys, love. Cliff Swallows at Mesa Verde whispers of the multitude of ways in which we are forever finding, losing, and only then rediscovering the deep interconnection of all life. An intimate look at impermanence and the emotional complexity of the world. Hutchison reminds us, “Not to understand is ok […] Just listen.”
—David Anthony Martin, author of The Ground Nest, Bijoux, Deepening the Map, Span, and founder of Middle Creek Publishing & Audio
