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...In her debut collection, Hutton focuses on the fundamental question of history—What part of now will be remembered later?—and shows how people are almost always too close to their own lives to say. In “First Glance,” the Lumiere Brothers, having made some of the earliest motion pictures, decide there’s no future in this technology, since “people . . . could see the same thing on the street.” And indeed, it’s life’s continuous wave of new experiences that haunts our answers to that question. In “My List,” Hutton notes that one’s sorrow can be “replaced by births, the smell of summer weeds, / a list of little happinesses.” Her list ends with how the Mayflower, after sailing home to Europe, “was dismantled and made into a barn. / No one remembers which barn it was.” Hutton’s poems are plain-spoken and matter-of-fact, consistently quiet, even as they register both the hushed awe of parenthood and the lingering shock of a friend’s suicide. While many poets’ first books house a menagerie of styles, forms, and concerns, Hutton’s brief poems (few stretch past half a page) are tightly unified in both tone and theme. The intensity is well sustained ...still, Hutton’s best poems combine odd angles on familiar bits of history with a nuanced attention to the in-the-moment happenings of her young family. When a friend asks, after her twins’ birth, “Don’t you wonder what they’ll be like?” she answers, “No, I don’t want it to be over.” The question of what will matter, Hutton suggests, is for future generations. For the living, everything matters. Perhaps the best response is to create things that will outlive us, the way “An old man plants an olive grove knowing / it won’t bear fruit for decades.” Or the way people live on through their children, who in turn will have children. “Even at two,” Hutton points out, “my daughter’s hips turn tenderly outward.”

--Matthew Thorburn, Boston Review

Readers of poetry who subscribe without reservation to that famous and famously overused dictum of writing teachers everywhere—Show, Don't Tell-will probably bristle at many of the lines in Susan Hutton's first book, like those that declare from the middle of "Light, Lasting": "Time passes, and this is its virtue: its economy, / the ways it consumes everything we give it." Or the penultimate phrases from "On Returning to the Midwest After a Seven-Year Absence," a meditation on the concept of homeland: "All boundaries are arbitrary / as is the way we love them." For those familiar with Pound's imagist manifesto ABC of Reading, or any of its numerous progeny, these are mortal sins.

Yet On the Vanishing of Large Creatures, Hutton's first book, seems tuned to another manifesto, this one written in 1963 by Robert Bly. His essay "A Wrong Turning in American Poetry" made the case for the poet as seer, as passionate seeker of subjective truths (instead of objective correlatives) who cultivates "an interest in spiritual development." Hutton's poems tend to be longer and more narrative than those of the Spanish poets Bly recommends (Machado, Jiminez, Vallejo); instead, they are reminiscent of the writers who took up Bly's call to arms: James Wright, for instance, and more recently Robert Hass. They share with Wright and Hass a fondness for telling, which in Wright's hands produced the devastating "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota," and in less masterful hands can produce, well, less masterful poems.

Hutton's plainspoken declarations, while not as arresting as Wright's, are nevertheless an ideal vehicle for her meditations on the passing of time and that notoriously fickle instrument, the human memory. At their best, the poems zero in on otherwise distant figures of history, as in "Seven Journeys":

. . . Marconi believed sound never stopped
and that one day we would create an instrument
that could capture every noise ever emitted in space.
We haven't, and that's just the beginning-
the bees can weave their honeycombs
from two or three different places and join the cells together
without leaving a seam. And Henry Hudson's men knew they were near
the New World when they began to smell the trees.

This final surprise, Hutton's conversational, almost didactic monologue rising out of itself to deliver an image of grace and precision, recurs a few pages later:

When Prokofiev was called away from Moscow
and his returning train was cancelled,
he heard his symphony played for the first time over the phone.
'It is not too bad,' he said, or they say he said.

What might have otherwise devolved into saccharine historical fiction is instead yanked back to the present: we have no idea what Prokofiev said, and given his reputation as Russia's symphonic enfant terrible, it was probably something much louder. Here Hutton treats music, that most romantic of subjects, with brusque practicality.

Hutton's best lines in this vein usually adopt a similar tone, firm but not unkind, as in the beginning of a poem on the extinction of indigenous languages: "Before a language dies we record the last speaker / to capture the sounds of the words. When he dies / we go on living, and the world is not different." In fact, in what might seem a direct departure from the passionate, spirit-driven poetry for which Bly argued, Hutton delivers many of her lines in just such a voice: flat and a little clinical, seemingly void of the emotional force that can drive a poem to lyrical heights. Yet their ostensible flatness is the driving force behind many of these poems, especially of "On Being Wrong," "Montgolfier," and the title-poem. Their individual lines are profoundly un-lyrical. They bear witness with a minimum of ornament, but with a keen sense of history's power over our own short lives.

...In ... "On Being Wrong," the poem departs from its initial subject, a motherless friend, and turns its attention to a single, surreal event: the accidental capture of an enormous sea-turtle by a pair of fishermen, its submerged body a "green coin" until it is hauled onto the pier, "snapping, hissing, huge and terrifying." When the fishermen dislodge the hook and heave the creature back into the water, Hutton's puzzled delight at the episode is reminiscent of a poet Bly never mentioned in his essay, but who was an equally fervent admirer of Spanish-language poetry—Elizabeth Bishop.

-- Matthew Ladd, West Branch