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Swimming Toward the Sun: Collected Poems: 1968-2020
Guernica Editions, Fall 2020
334 pages
Trade Paperback
ISBN13: 9781771835404
ISBN10: 1771835400
English
$25.00 Canada, $21.95 US, £14.95 UK
Swimming Toward the Sun: Collected Poems (1968-2020) brings together five decades of poetry of the accomplished Canadian poet Laurence Hutchman. He invites us to take a poetic odyssey, starting in the late 1960s in his travels to Europe, leading us through the turbulent times in cosmopolitan Montreal of the 1970s, to a long residence in New Brunswick and finally his return to Ontario. Through a powerful and daring use of language and a haunting musicality of lines, Hutchman explores the relationship between real and imaginative landscape as he bears witness to his place and time.
The bricks have never been so red. / The sky is blue as it was in the beginning-- /
a clear pastel eternity. / The clouds are fantastic swirls, feelings. / The brilliant grass glimmers through the fence, / and I must watch this lonely swimmer, / ten years old and struggling in the shallow water. / “Look, I can almost touch the bottom.”
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.
Gary Geddes
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.
Bruce Meyer
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.
Brian Bartlett on Selected Poems
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 …
M. Travis Lane on Reading the Water
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.
Russell Thornton
Books by Laurence Hutchman
