No one can sum up Chris Hutchinson’s poetry better than he does himself: “a deep-felt nothingness you consider/ art.” His poetry is deeply felt, I have no doubt. But, although I hesitate to call it nothing, it nevertheless evokes very little feeling in me.
You can certainly pick out a few redeeming lines: “the lines around her eyes like roadmaps/ describe years of going/ nowhere” in “Lost in Transit.” “We exhale deeply sighs/ the size of thoughtless resignation” in “Static.” But this is about as good as it gets. One often wonders, as in “Anna’s kitchen,” what reason he has for breaking up lines like:
the light in Anna’s kitchen would thicken/in the lazy afternoons, its radiance bundle/more tightly around the passing time
Why end on the word “bundle?” Hutchinson’s writing is introspective to the point that you would have to be him, or know him, to get it (or to care?). (Sarah Nelson)
by Chris Hutchinson, 96 pages, J. Gordon Shillingford Publishing, P.O. Box 86, RPO Corydon Ave., Winnipeg, MB, R3M 3S3, jgshillingford.com