BOA EDITIONS, LTD.

Slope of the Child Everlasting

Poems by Laurie Kutchins

American Poets Continuum Series

 

The poems in Laurie Kutchins' new collection sustain the lyric and imagistic sensibility of her last book, The Night Path, but depart significantly from it in narrative, structure, voice, and topic. The poems in Slope of the Child Everlasting grew out of extended scrutiny of master poets--Matsuo Basho, Elizabeth Bishop, Garcia Lorca, Rainer Maria Rilke, Li Po, and others--as Kutchins searched for forms and voices to express post-September 11 rupture.

The book's central images and voices are archetypes--who "do their work" largely from the soundings of the unconscious. Kutchins employs forms, including haiku, renga, sestina, and ghazal, to present a wide range of characters drawn from memory and her imagination. The mountains, the great divide, the river, the owl and the blind man all visit the Underworld. From their journey to this fertile mythic darkness, these characters claim their futures through visions of the past--the urge of the bloodroot.

Togwotee

Atop this white divide be still, be the horned owl after hunger.

Marry my little ear to a stone in the wind's two-ocean river.

Churn me open, spawn of death, spine of summer thunder.

Bring mud and hummingbird back to rock, cloud, river.

Then teach me winter. Let me learn leaving and returning are the           same

Yearning of breath: you can go anywhere from here murmurs upriver.

Remember mother-of-pearl, father wading out to fish the sandbar.

Remember silt and eggs, the child of clay, the slope below the river.

Let mouth be our meeting, brother to the ocean's inland quiver,

Sister into snow driven seven directions down river.

Copyright © 2007 by BOA Editions

Available editions:
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Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-929918-91-1
Price: $15.50
Publishing Date: May 2007

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BOA Editions, Ltd. would like to thank the following generous Publishing Partners for their support of Slope of the Child Everlasting:

Anonymous (6)

Nancy & Alan Cameros

Craig Challender

Gwen & Gary Conners

Margaret E. Cronin

Susan DeWitt Davie

Peter & Sue Durant

Pete & Bev French

Dane & Judy Gordon

Kip & Deb Hale

Robin & Peter Hursh

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Stanley D. McKenzie

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Thomas R. Ward in memory of Jane Buell Ward

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