Here's everything you want in poetry. Understandable language—check. Interesting, inventive use of words—check. Topics that reference matters of common interest—check. Insights way beyond the usual—check. Don't skim this collection. You'd miss way too much that makes our lives meaningful. Enter and walk “unafraid in this new topography.”
- Sharon Scholl, Professor emerita of humanities.
Born in Paintsville, Kentucky, Shutta Crum is an award-winning author and poet, educator, story-teller, public speaker and retired librarian. She is the author of three novels and thirteen story books for young readers. When You Get Here is her first poetry chapbook for adult readers. She resides with her husband in Ann Arbor, Michigan and her website is www.shutta.com
Something about the book cover tells us that we are going to be on the road. The first three sections of the book confirm the fact with reference to driving directions, roads, detours and tolls. Advice, in the form of driving directions is given to a daughter and also to a son about the life that stretches out before them. This is not the advice of an over-protective mother smothering her offspring, but of a mother who recognizes the need to let go so that her young can find their own way in life. They contain the lightest but most useful advice. To her daughter, she says 'Stop often and ask for directions', 'Don't strand / yourself with zealots upon the curb of / one idea. They Have their own / pilgrimages to make', and 'Be sure to tell the man you've met / that he is beautiful'. To her son she says 'Don't take the first road, / or the second. Wait until afternoon / shadows lengthen, then drive / toward the last glimmerings / of the day.' and 'Tell the companion you'll find / that she is beautiful'.
The alliteratively titled 'How to Walk Well in the World' is a modern take on Kipling's 'If' but here the approach is much less direct and beautifully oblique: 'Step softly when storefronts are still groggy with sleep...rescue wind--tossed sentences blown against your shins'. This is worldly wisdom handed down in an imaginative and poetic way.
Another beautiful pairing of poems occurs later in the book when Crum writes movingly about the death of her parents. Both poems share a common vocabulary: the unusual adjective 'crook-backed' is used in both poems as a descriptor of trees and of mountains. In the first poem there are 'veins of leaves' and in the second 'veins of coal'. Rivers flow through each and both compositions are seasonal: the one set in autumn and the other in winter. Words such as 'clots' and 'canker' in the first poem and 'flanks' and 'scars' in the second assume a double meaning with reference to the natural scenery and the physicality of the human body.
The longest poem in the collection, 'A Philosophy of Luminescence' employs scientific analogies to shed new light on a marriage. Another pairing takes place here which is carried over into the title of the next poem: 'Our Luminous Patient', in which Crum writes about caring for her father in his last illness:
What was there to do but brace
ourselves against the good wood
of this house and shore-up the
ramparts of our father's room?'Fern Hill Lost' is a clever re-working of Dylan Thomas's evocation of childhood. Here, Crum deftly catches his phrasing, his sound patterns, his use of alliteration and his employment of hyphenated words.
In 'Summer Portrait' Crum's repeated phrase 'there may have been' reminds us that, at best, our memories are selective and, like photographs that have been exposed to sunlight, fade over time.
One of my favourite poems in this collection is 'The Visitor'. A wolf (real or imagined) follows the narrator onto the ice. The wolf is by turns 'snow-fog soft / and indistinct, or sudden, sharp, / and ice-crusted.' They meet each other right at the centre of the poem and it is like a meeting of minds. 'By snowlight we are / nose to nose. She is wolf, not phantom - / the air about her stilled, warm. / She, more civilized than I.' It has the mystery and the majesty that one often discerns in the writings of the late Mary Oliver.
Whether she is writing about her father's world, a house above which UFOs were sighted in 1966 or the tragedy of a school shooting at West Nickel Mines in 2006, Crum's poems guide us through grief, awe and wonder in accessible and inventive language that maps the topography of our lives.
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