Guernica Editions

Speaking of success in the endless long-distance runaround that all poets are confronted with, after the passions of youthful self-expression have passed into the graveyard of juvenilia, Laurence Hutchman’s Collected Poems: Swimming Toward the Sun (Guernica Editions 2020) speaks so well of the rewards reaped by a lifetime’s dedication to ars poetica that I hardly know where to start. So many fine lyrics: celebrating, questioning, regretting, resurrecting. This is a volume which will reward the attentive reader not just for these winter months, but for many years to come.

In a literature that is constantly being weakened critically and artistically by momentary voices whose importance fade almost the moment the ink hits the page, Hutchman’s work carries many of the hallmarks of poetry that has survived the test of time – the love of nature expressed by Bliss Carman, the keen eye for observation articulated by Archibald Lampman, the gift of connecting the idea to the place found in Raymond Knister’s opus, and the deep, energetic passion of Gwendolyn MacEwen’s haunting lyricism.

Laurence Hutchman’s poetry is a witness to the world around him, to the patterns of families, nations, and landscape … With this selection from his previous books, it’s clearer than ever how Hutchman’s mix of curiosity-driven realism and metaphorical surprise gives his poetry generosity and scope.

Laurence Hutchman is a devoted cartographer of the quotidian, whose poems manage to combine a Dutch voluptuousness, an Irish gift-of-the-gab, and a degree of Canadian cool.

The House of Shifting Time is the work of a fine wordsmith who earns his poems with his life. Here is a poet you can trust to be true to emotion and experience.

Laurence Hutchman writes for the voice, composing by cadence, and making full use of the musical possibilities of gesture, echo, repetition and variation … and his imagery is often kinesthetic, as well synaesthetically visual, aural …