These are poems made of deep listening-to the words of other writers, to the earth, to silence, to history, and to the poet's own inner voice. Because of this attentiveness, as I read Cliff Swallow at Mesa Verde, I felt invited into the best kind of conversation-the kind in which we discover the world, and ourselves, again and again.
-Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, author of The Unfolding and host of The Poetic Path
Whether he's honoring dead poets, describing the natural world, or taking us to sacred ancient places, in his new book - Cliff Swallow at Mesa Verde - Joe Hutchison offers reflection, insight and many enchanting turns of phrase to tell us his stories: "...shadows / high over kivas and cliff-houses, / rise, flutter, dither, swoop - a wide loop / old as the world." And "...ponderosas / sway in the icy blast, groan / like oars in oarlocks or bass notes / of Igbo work songs..." Highly recommended.
-Art Goodtimes, poet
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 intimatelook 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
About the Author
Joseph Hutchison, Colorado Poet Laureate (2014-2019), has published 12 chapbooks and eight full poetry collections, most recently Under Sleep's New Moon; Marked Men; and The World As Is: New & Selected Poems, 1972-2015.. New poems have appeared recently in Berlin Literary Review, Main Street Rag, Poetry Salzburg Review, and Pratik: A Magazine of Contemporary Literature. Joe lives with his wife, Melody Madonna, in the mountains southwest of Denver, his native city.
