Slope of the Child Everlasting by Laurie Kutchins

In 21st-century America, few have the intimate knowledge and appreciation of the natural world that poet Laurie Kutchins possesses. Of those, fewer still have her gift of language. Kutchins grew up on a sheep ranch in Wyoming, a land of harsh beauty she has described as a world of bone, rocks and wind. So intensely has her native place influenced Kutchins, one could say it bequeathed her more than any human ancestor has. It is not surprising, then, that the natural world, particularly of the west, remains a potent force in her third book of poetry.

In other ways, though, Slope of the Child Everlasting marks a departure from Kutchins’ previous collections, Between Towns and The Night Path.

As the contrast in titles suggests, this third volume is riskier, more experimental in form and imagination. Kutchins’ work has always been associative and lyrical, but her earlier poems had a stronger narrative quality than those in Slope of the Child Everlasting, where she dares to let images and sound lead her and trusts readers to follow. This is not to say the poems are unintelligible or murky. A keen observer, Kutchins is too committed to accurate and vivid writing to publish rudderless imaginings, but in this book, meaning is conveyed via rich connections among recurring words and images more often than from a story line.

Kutchins acknowledges this departure when she writes in the poem “Riverkeeper” that “I am just learning to know flowers / I have always known only rock and stone / a safer thing.”

The reader senses it is a post-9/11-motivated quest that prompts the poet to venture down experimental paths. The 2001 attacks are never mentioned, but twin towers haunt the poems, verbally (the “twin bell towers” of “Santuario”) and visually (poems that appear on the page as twin columns). It is a tribute to Kutchins’ skill that these dual-form poems don’t feel gimmicky. In each, the divided form serves a purpose. One example is a poem based on the myth of Daphne and Apollo. “The Laurel” dwells on the moment of Daphne’s transformation from fleeing woman to laurel tree, and the split form underscores this metamorphosis.

Other instances of metamorphosis and paradox drawn from nature permeate the book. The turtle appears in several poems as a symbol of dormancy and reemergence. In “The Voice Outside,” the animal is called the “truest Persephone, going under half the year.” In “Song of the Turtle Unburrowing,” the turtle herself speaks from “the ruckus of the garden lunging / back into the world. …”

“I still come back

like rock

caked with mud.

Deep in the subtle

mulch I risk

the spring wind

teasing my beak

as if it wished

I were the robin. …

It is characteristic of Kutchins’ singular voice that she can speak so lyrically of a reptile emerging from mud. Or of discarded skin as she does in “Skin,” where the black snake “… leaves its skin behind / each spring like a secret gift / no longer dark or urgent without / its body.”

No section divisions signal that the poems in the book follow the course of a year’s seasonal cycle, but we are aware of it — as we are that the month of September carries symbolic importance. A pivotal month in the cycle of the year, it marks the end of summer’s warmth and fecundity and the coming of winter’s darkness, cold and dormancy. And since 2001, the month has acquired broader associations with vulnerability and loss. On one level, the poem “September Fever” is about a child’s end-of-vacation bout of flu, but within the context of the book, lines such as “In one night wind out of the north / shoved aside the whole / fat hayroll of summer” have greater significance.

But Kutchins is a realist, not a pessimist, and in writing these poems, she has sought to learn again to trust the rhythms of mortality, to accept the full spectrum of the life cycle. In one of the final poems, “Molt,” she appeals, ” … teach me the grace of loss.” With this book, she shares that lesson.