The Way to the River

Born in Paintsville, Kentucky, Shutta Crum is an award-winning author and poet, educator, story-teller, public speaker and retired librarian. Her first poetry chapbook, When You Get Here, was published by Kelsay Books in 2020. The Way to the River is her second collection. She resides with her husband in Ann Arbor, Michigan and her website is www.shutta.com

The book cover is a story in itself and it is very much in tune with the territory inside. Judging by the name of the State on the map being held up against the steering wheel, we are on a journey, either heading for, or possibly lost in, the Pacific Northwest. Maybe the vehicle has broken down and it is time to summon help or maybe it is just a moment to open the door, cool down, and enjoy a short break in the journey. Part of its intrigue is the number of different interpretations that it opens up in the reader’s imagination.

The mini-stories behind Crum’s poems are also on a journey, a journey that requires some map reading for it is a journey through life and a journey through faith. In addition to Oregon, the terrain covered includes places such as Maggie Valley in North Carolina, Grayling in Michigan, Micanopy in Florida and Moab in Utah. We are guided throughout by maps, highways and rivers as Crum skillfully makes use of these metaphors to move her poems forward in a structured and disciplined way.

In the opening section, ‘Why Poetry?’, Crum sets out her poetic creed. She sees her poems in terms of fleeting images, gestures of recognition, paying attention to how her poems sit together and form a cohesive whole even as they are also meant to be read as entities in their own right. Those fleeting images offering gestures of recognition work well in ‘How Poetry Reframes the Moment’ where one thing sparks off the memory of another. In it, she asks us to:

..reframe the way water
undermines the banks of the creek bed.
Now, it’s the arthritis eating at the dust-colored dog –
known only as Boy –
who always cranked himself up to greet you at the gate.

There are some strong images in this poem: the misfiring of a tractor, the sound of a log-splitter echoing from a next-door farm and a persistence of fireflies circling near the creek.

The next section, ‘Of maps and Their Roads’, puts us into the driving seat as we pour over all those maps of interesting places: the Three Graces, otherwise known as Crab Rocks, a beautiful dive site just off US101 ‘the kind of road / that furthered dreams’ west of Garibaldi, Oregon; Mystic Seaport in Connecticut which contains the largest maritime museum in the United States; Joshua Tree National Park in California. There is no knowing where a road may take you in this collection since all are worthy of exploration. As Crum says in her poem ‘How to Properly Read a Paper Map’, ‘Watch for a road / that reaches out to touch your foot. / Maybe just a thin thread – an idea of a road.’ I know when I was a child, farm tracks and country roads, especially ones that threatened at any moment to peter out into nothingness, held a certain fascination for me. In ‘Farnsworth Road’ Crum revisits her own childhood street noting how it feels both familiar and foreign to her now. In ‘Coming into Maggie Valley' we get a real sense of the awe and majesty of the Great Smoky Mountains even if their summits are ‘arrayed / in turbans of fog’.

The poems in ‘Someone to Ride Shotgun’ invite us to connect with strangers. Two of the finest poems in the collection, ‘We Meet for Coffee at a Crowded Café’ and ‘Reading Brodsky (in English) While Stirring Soup’ appear in this section, the former earning Crum a Pushcart Prize nomination by Typehouse Literary in 2020.

River water flows through many of the poems in the next two sections: ‘Wading Out’ and ‘Water in the Lungs’. In ‘At the River’ Crum not only pulls up a discarded bicycle tire but also a memory. In other poems she writes of a river in spate, a journey of faith that begins with a baptism witnessed by the family in a creek and an account of the eroding force of water on rock in which Crum observes that ‘It takes millennia. Yet, / intention never wavers.’

In the second of these two sections about rivers, ‘Water in the Lungs’ Crum shifts her focus on to the darker side of things, writing in one poem about the murder victim, known as ‘Lavender Doe’ before her true identity was discovered, whose body had been set on fire in a pile of burning brush minutes before it was discovered in Kilgore, Texas in 2006. It is a powerful poem that sets out the facts of the case with the minimum of poetical embellishment.

The penultimate section, ‘Where the Dark Wild Closes In’ speaks of personal loss and includes the poem ‘Things Done Wrong’, a moving elegy addressed to Crum’s mother. It opens with a beautiful image:

Forgive me –
when you left, I forgot
to harvest the poems
that had taken root
in the floodplain of your hands.

and ends in remorse – a word that is defined in the next poem ‘All That is Left’ so succinctly:

remorse is a small sad word
uncapitalized.

The final section, ‘Everything is Far’ closes on an upbeat, optimistic and slightly humorous note where Crum, in her poem ‘No Mansions for Me’, envisages her arrival in Heaven. Perhaps it is here that the journey of faith ends…or maybe it is just about to begin.

This is an assured collection by a writer who is confident in her craft and I recommend it to all our readers.

Shutta Crum, The Way to the River. Kelsay Books 2022.

Crum brings us to and along and on and around the river where it is “rough going.” She discovers also that “All my loves are entwined,” and then eventually leads us to a poem on swimming in heaven. The temporary nature of life does not limit the depth of experience that the poems reveal, such as in “How to Properly Read a Paper Map,” which instructs, “When you go, dress warmly. / Drive Slowly. / Wave often.” The message to be in the present moment feels clear and important even amidst the ephemeral nature of life.”