Night Path

From Library JournalThis collection of poems, winner of the 1997 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, will be a blessing to everyone who enjoys poetry and has parented a child or may do so someday. Kutchins writes with grace primarily about pregnancy, childbirth, and tending a newborn. Her poems explore the depths of early motherhood, but not all the poems are concerned with maternity. The poet walks with her mother in a seamy part of New York City, comes to terms with her father's cancer, witnesses a traffic fatality, swims in a swift river that is "white as ash and boiling." But the thread that links these poems is the creation of new life: "Little night tapper, my dreamer and my dream,/ my bones will soon turn to water/ for you." The poems are not arranged chronologically, which is initially disturbing (for example, poems about pregnancy follow poems about breastfeeding). But the book carries its own rhythm, and the "order" matters less and less as the reader moves through it. Kutchins is a poet who questions: "How long did I overlook November?" "What is it like to live without a future?" "Who is he, this stranger pulled from me?" Hers is not a closed world of certainty but an open world of great mystery. This is a poet who matters.?Judy Clarence, California State Univ. Lib., Hayward