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BRETT RUTHERFORD. AN EXPECTATION OF PRESENCES.

Here is Brett Rutherford’s first new compendium of poems in seven years. Following on The Gods As They Are On Their Planets (2005) and Poems from Providence (1991), this book is a must for fans of this neo-Romantic American poet.
The 94 new poems and revisions in this collection range from a dark-shadowed childhood in the coal and coke region of Western Pennsylvania, to New York City and Providence, Rhode Island. The jolting sequence titled “Out Home” is a poetic memoir of broken families and childhood terrors, and the imminent threat of kidnapping and mutilation by “Doctor Jones,” a crazed surgeon who roams the countryside in a sinister roadster. The small boy of these poems is already a self-styled outsider, defining his difference from the crushing environment around him.
In “Past the Millennium” and “Ars Poetica,” the full-grown poet soars, with politically-charged poems on Solzhenitsyn, the self-immolation of Czech martyr Jan Palach, and the imagined overtaking of Bush and Cheney by “The Black Huntsman.” Rutherford walks in Poe’s footsteps on a Hudson River pier, visits ancient Rome for a chat with the lawgiving King Numa Pompilius, and puts Poe to work tracking down a cemetery specter in 1848 Providence. Two historic verse plays give voice to the mad Carlota, Empress of Mexico, and two Austrian policemen with an unexpected prisoner on their hands.
Humor abounds in this volume, too, from the possessed sex toys in “A Night in Eddie’s Apartment,” skeptical Martians refusing to believe there’s life on Earth, nine-year-old Dante meeting Beatrice in Providence’s Federal Hill, and a surrealist adventure across Europe as a lost sock-puppet searches for its owner, meeting Sigmund Freud along the way.
A sequence of poems on Love and Eros titled “Love Spells” plumbs the depths of desire and obsession, and presents several powerful elegies, culminating with the poignant “The Loft on Fourteenth Street.” The erotic poems, some set in Ancient Greece and some in the present, are frank and often amusing, perhaps some comfort for those who think the fun ends at thirty.
Ending the book is a clump of supernatural poems, as expected from this heir of Poe and Lovecraft: a story-length poem, “Dawn,” presents the ennui of a 300-year-old vampire; the birth and education of the feared witch Keziah Mason; wind elementals attack the headquarters of Bain Capital in Boston; and Elder Gods arrive to make humans their playthings.
An Expectation of Presences is a wide-ranging and startling collection, romantic, defiant, and bracingly hopeful.

THE BUTCHER KNIFE

Not once did I see one used for butchering:
the wooden handle firm in the grasp,
the broad, long edge, serrated ominously,
quite capable of rending limb from torso,
or a small head from a shuddering spine.

No, the fame of these kitchen implements
was their use by neurotic aunties,
stepmothers too jealous and easily provoked,
old wives at the end of married tether.

Medea in slippers and terrycloth,
red-eyed from onion chopping,
she waved it aloft in a shrieking rage, or,
worse by far, swung it in stone-eyed silence.

She could chase and corner a terrified
stepchild (while her own, better daughter
watches from the stairwell landing),
or send the man hurtling to corner tavern.

In the right hands, this most domestic
of kitchen tools clears any house
of inconvenient relatives,
of the need for cooking and mending,

a Pennsylvania Gothic sword
that never needs sharpening.

*** ***

From TRIPTYCH: A PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE

There never was an ocean.
We drank tea, in the city of Providence.
We listened to Mahler and Berlioz.
A closed door was always between our sleeping.
On Sunday, you fled the seven-hilled city.
I watched from my bench on the summit
as you hurtled down Angell Street.
Long I lingered, long I watched for you
as you turned down the twisted lanes.
And why do I most remember departures,
the back of you, your crossbow gaze
hurling its bolts on everyone but me?
Did our locked eyes frighten you?

One’s young self delighting me,
one’s older self, me, a dread to you?

Even the absence
of your image, an outline
I can trace in the air before me,
seems too beautiful to touch,
unbearable Phoebus, my searing star!

*** ***

OCTOBER THOUGHTS IN WAR-TIME

What does October mean?

To the Chinese, a mottled dream of maple, gingko,
ailanthus and willow, in which one pale
and angular scholar, his beard as thin as an artist’s brush,
takes tea in his gazebo, as the autumn’s white tiger
runs down the bounding deer.

For me, in this New England city,
it is not quite autumn.
I spy the moon’s new crisped crescent
hovering above the Hopkins house.
An angry Mars is at its nearest —
all these heavenly bodies tugging at treetops.

The Unitarian bell tolls eight, as Uranus,
a dim flickering, grazes the steeple
as though curious to know
for whom the clabber sounds the bronze.

The weary earth has had enough explosions.
Winter will yield up autumn,
if autumn will erase its merry carnage.
If leaves do not fall, perhaps the heads of state
will leave decisions undecided,
prisoners un-decapitated,
toxins unmanufactured,
uranium un-enriched —
perhaps the deadly elements
will go unmined, the gray bombers
unmanufactured,

the hateful thought, snug in its walnut,
from its high branch
unfalling.

Paperback edition. ISBN: 978-0922558698. 364 pages. 6 x 9 inches. Published July 2012. $19.95. CLICK HERE to order from Amazon.

Hardcover edition. ISBN: 979-8788095431. 364 pages. 6 x 9 inches. Published December 2021. $25.00. CLICK HERE to order from Amazon.

Or, CLICK HERE to purchase the PDF ebook from Payhip for $4.00. CLICK HERE to purchase the Kindle edition from Amazon for $2.99.

Version 25 Updated August 19, 2024.