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I Wish I Had a Heart Like Yours, Walt Whitman
In "Return of the Heroes," Walt Whitman refers to the casualties of the American Civil War: "the dead to me mar not. . . . / they fit very well in the landscape under the trees and grass. . . ." In her new poetry collection, Jude Nutter challenges Whitman's statement by exploring her own responses to war and conflict and, in a voice by turns rueful, dolorous, and imagistic, reveals why she cannot agree.
Nutter, who was born in England and grew up in Germany, has a visceral sense of history as a constant, violent companion. Drawing on a range of locales and historical moments—among them Rwanda, Sarajevo, Nagasaki, and both world wars—she replays the confrontation of personal history colliding with history as a social, political, and cultural force. In many of the poems, this confrontation is understood through the shift from childhood innocence and magical thinking to adult awareness and guilt.
Nutter responds to Whitman from another perspective as well. It was Whitman who wrote that he could live with animals because, among other things, they are placid, self-contained, and guiltless. As counterpoint, Nutter weaves a series of animal poems—a kind of personal bestiary—throughout the collection that reveals the tragedy and violence also inherent in the lives of animals. Here, as in much of Nutter's previous work, the boundaries between the animal and human worlds are permeable; the urgent voice of the poet insists we recognize that "Even from a distance, suffering / is suffering." Here is both acknowledgment and challenge: distance may be measured in terms of time, culture, or place, or it may be caused by the gap between animals and humans, but it is our responsibility to speak against atrocity and bloodshed, however voiceless we may feel.“In poem after poem, Jude Nutter bridges the gap between past and present, loss and reclamation, and does so in expansive, passionate lyrics full of clarity, imagination, and sureness of vision. She is, quite simply, one of the finest poets writing in America today. This is a powerful, poignant volume, each poem ‘a gesture of welcome’ that brings us home to the great healing powers of our language.” —Robert Hedin, author of The Old Liberators: New and Selected Poems and Translations and editor of the Great River Review
“Driven, almost tormented, by her sense of historical events, by what war accomplishes and destroys, Jude Nutter does the poet’s work of resurrection—she mourns and makes real with language some of the enormous losses suffered, and with her exceptional gifts brings some of the lost back to life to be thought of, considered, and remembered by her readers. It matters when such an accomplished poet insists we pay attention and then shows us what to attend to in this extraordinary new collection of poems.” —Deborah Keenan, author of Willow Room, Green Door: New and Selected Poems
“The poems in Jude Nutter's I Wish I Had a Heart Like Yours, Walt Whitman consistently and beautifully re-imagine the poem of meditation on the atrocities of war. Nutter invokes, invites and revises Whitman's civil war poems through thoroughly contemporary and female perspectives. These poems haunt and inspire with a lush expansiveness that slams that old mind/body gap quite closed.” —Leslie Adrienne Miller, author of The Resurrection Trade
Nutter, who was born in England and grew up in Germany, has a visceral sense of history as a constant, violent companion. Drawing on a range of locales and historical moments—among them Rwanda, Sarajevo, Nagasaki, and both world wars—she replays the confrontation of personal history colliding with history as a social, political, and cultural force. In many of the poems, this confrontation is understood through the shift from childhood innocence and magical thinking to adult awareness and guilt.
Nutter responds to Whitman from another perspective as well. It was Whitman who wrote that he could live with animals because, among other things, they are placid, self-contained, and guiltless. As counterpoint, Nutter weaves a series of animal poems—a kind of personal bestiary—throughout the collection that reveals the tragedy and violence also inherent in the lives of animals. Here, as in much of Nutter's previous work, the boundaries between the animal and human worlds are permeable; the urgent voice of the poet insists we recognize that "Even from a distance, suffering / is suffering." Here is both acknowledgment and challenge: distance may be measured in terms of time, culture, or place, or it may be caused by the gap between animals and humans, but it is our responsibility to speak against atrocity and bloodshed, however voiceless we may feel.“In poem after poem, Jude Nutter bridges the gap between past and present, loss and reclamation, and does so in expansive, passionate lyrics full of clarity, imagination, and sureness of vision. She is, quite simply, one of the finest poets writing in America today. This is a powerful, poignant volume, each poem ‘a gesture of welcome’ that brings us home to the great healing powers of our language.” —Robert Hedin, author of The Old Liberators: New and Selected Poems and Translations and editor of the Great River Review
“Driven, almost tormented, by her sense of historical events, by what war accomplishes and destroys, Jude Nutter does the poet’s work of resurrection—she mourns and makes real with language some of the enormous losses suffered, and with her exceptional gifts brings some of the lost back to life to be thought of, considered, and remembered by her readers. It matters when such an accomplished poet insists we pay attention and then shows us what to attend to in this extraordinary new collection of poems.” —Deborah Keenan, author of Willow Room, Green Door: New and Selected Poems
“The poems in Jude Nutter's I Wish I Had a Heart Like Yours, Walt Whitman consistently and beautifully re-imagine the poem of meditation on the atrocities of war. Nutter invokes, invites and revises Whitman's civil war poems through thoroughly contemporary and female perspectives. These poems haunt and inspire with a lush expansiveness that slams that old mind/body gap quite closed.” —Leslie Adrienne Miller, author of The Resurrection Trade
- GenresPoetry
124 pages, Paperback
First published February 15, 2009
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
May 21, 2012
I wish I had a voice like yours, Jude Nutter!
I made myself slow down my reading. I put the book down to think, letting her poetry sink more surely into the well of memory. Nutter's poems will do many thing, but not bore. Is it really possible one woman has endured so much? She writes so vivdly, with images at once impossibly fresh yet familiar as one's own memory; as though she has focused a laser on Jung's collective conscious, exploding the glass beads of our memories into millions of glittering fragments, in which each fragments still reflects the whole!
Like a college freshman, I have taken a yellow highlighter to mark the passages for memorization, and every page is now a bright yellow.
What would I give to writhe with her precision of detail, surprise waiting in every line. A treasure.
Thank you Jude Nutter!
I made myself slow down my reading. I put the book down to think, letting her poetry sink more surely into the well of memory. Nutter's poems will do many thing, but not bore. Is it really possible one woman has endured so much? She writes so vivdly, with images at once impossibly fresh yet familiar as one's own memory; as though she has focused a laser on Jung's collective conscious, exploding the glass beads of our memories into millions of glittering fragments, in which each fragments still reflects the whole!
Like a college freshman, I have taken a yellow highlighter to mark the passages for memorization, and every page is now a bright yellow.
What would I give to writhe with her precision of detail, surprise waiting in every line. A treasure.
Thank you Jude Nutter!
September 27, 2020
A wonderful book from one of my favorite poets, and a great mentor to my writing
September 10, 2012
What feels to be the thesis of this book:
it's been slipping beneath the skin / of every poem I write (10)
Your father's dead will not leave you in peace (81)
Phrases and images I loved:
At the keyholes of the nostrils (1)
crisp grass with green light up its sleeves (1)
the wind's white shoulders (2)
banner of his blood (2)
the breath of the [gun] barrel (3)
black knuckle of an axe head (5)
boys began to smell strange, like objects / that never dried out, like the rank / hug of air in the bunker (11)
And this is how I came to language, / with such fear in my small body. And it would burn / down through me like a wick. (13)
the pod of a silver canoe (14)
dirt's top drawer (16)
this is how it was that we let you die // several different deaths at once even though / you were given only one. (27)
Long, braided / straps of song (29)
the yoke of your narrow / shoulders (31)
the leaves like the polished tongues // of church shoes. (31)
chime of trowels (40)
urge us to offer // our bodies up into the mouths of others (41)
I was on my knees, which had blown / inside out, like flowers (43)
I found my donkey, half dead / and braying in the ruins, wearing stockings / of blood and shit. (44)
the small, worn / tray of the page (53)
the wet drawbridge of his tongue (56)
the fender of your teeth (56)
its bright, precise grammar of sails (61)
The knife was honed and bright as a grass blade. (65)
a fritter of sunlight (67)
These are girls / who have recently discovered / that the bodies they have are the bodies / men want more than they / themselves do. (72)
wearing even / the promise of their large hands like expensive / accessories (73)
sliding through the belt of shadow / under the overpass (73)
the bright lasso / of a wedding ring (75)
the heart's // four neighborhoods (77)
Bless the grave of every poem. (78)
The brain / is just a basket of blood vessels. (91)
the insects / mistake my windows for clean platters / of sky (96)
green trawl of light (98)
I thought the flesh // was a door but it was always a mirror (101)
the heart's / plump slipper, there between the lungs' little kitbags (101)
And a blog post about reading the book (assigned during my Loft mentorship): [soon to come]
it's been slipping beneath the skin / of every poem I write (10)
Your father's dead will not leave you in peace (81)
Phrases and images I loved:
At the keyholes of the nostrils (1)
crisp grass with green light up its sleeves (1)
the wind's white shoulders (2)
banner of his blood (2)
the breath of the [gun] barrel (3)
black knuckle of an axe head (5)
boys began to smell strange, like objects / that never dried out, like the rank / hug of air in the bunker (11)
And this is how I came to language, / with such fear in my small body. And it would burn / down through me like a wick. (13)
the pod of a silver canoe (14)
dirt's top drawer (16)
this is how it was that we let you die // several different deaths at once even though / you were given only one. (27)
Long, braided / straps of song (29)
the yoke of your narrow / shoulders (31)
the leaves like the polished tongues // of church shoes. (31)
chime of trowels (40)
urge us to offer // our bodies up into the mouths of others (41)
I was on my knees, which had blown / inside out, like flowers (43)
I found my donkey, half dead / and braying in the ruins, wearing stockings / of blood and shit. (44)
the small, worn / tray of the page (53)
the wet drawbridge of his tongue (56)
the fender of your teeth (56)
its bright, precise grammar of sails (61)
The knife was honed and bright as a grass blade. (65)
a fritter of sunlight (67)
These are girls / who have recently discovered / that the bodies they have are the bodies / men want more than they / themselves do. (72)
wearing even / the promise of their large hands like expensive / accessories (73)
sliding through the belt of shadow / under the overpass (73)
the bright lasso / of a wedding ring (75)
the heart's // four neighborhoods (77)
Bless the grave of every poem. (78)
The brain / is just a basket of blood vessels. (91)
the insects / mistake my windows for clean platters / of sky (96)
green trawl of light (98)
I thought the flesh // was a door but it was always a mirror (101)
the heart's / plump slipper, there between the lungs' little kitbags (101)
And a blog post about reading the book (assigned during my Loft mentorship): [soon to come]
January 14, 2016
This collection is a very difficult read. To say that it is bleak is to be kind.
But out of that darkness comes such a brilliant beauty. There were so many pages that I had to fold over, so many lines that I had to underline - lines that were so fantastic that I had to stop reading the poem in order to repeat those lines...
It took me much longer to finish this collection than it usually takes me to devour a book of poetry. Part of that is that I found it trying at times to be immersed in its darkness. Part of that is that I wanted to savor the amazing writing, that I didn't want it to end.
This is just such an important book. One of my favorite books of poetry. It has been nearly five years since I last read a book by Jude Nutter - I fully intend to be much, much quicker about buying another.
But out of that darkness comes such a brilliant beauty. There were so many pages that I had to fold over, so many lines that I had to underline - lines that were so fantastic that I had to stop reading the poem in order to repeat those lines...
It took me much longer to finish this collection than it usually takes me to devour a book of poetry. Part of that is that I found it trying at times to be immersed in its darkness. Part of that is that I wanted to savor the amazing writing, that I didn't want it to end.
This is just such an important book. One of my favorite books of poetry. It has been nearly five years since I last read a book by Jude Nutter - I fully intend to be much, much quicker about buying another.
June 12, 2013
I read this for a book club. And while the members of the group enjoyed it, it wasn't exactly my cup of tea. While each poem contains a moment or two of poetic beauty, the lines within the poem tend to be more true to the sentence structure than the lyric.
In addition to this is the overwhelming concern of the subject matter. I'm not sure whether this is something that the author does or if it's something war poetry tends to do. However, reading a book of poetry about war from a bystander ends up feeling a little voyeuristic to me. I think it's difficult to avoid, and in places, I think Jude Nutter does, but overall, it left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth.
In addition to this is the overwhelming concern of the subject matter. I'm not sure whether this is something that the author does or if it's something war poetry tends to do. However, reading a book of poetry about war from a bystander ends up feeling a little voyeuristic to me. I think it's difficult to avoid, and in places, I think Jude Nutter does, but overall, it left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth.
April 17, 2010
Whoa. Steel yourself for this one, because it is one intense, gut-wrenching, heart-rending journey. What does it mean to grow up in a house visible in aerial photographs of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, to see Anne Frank disappear behind its fences?
It means you can't see beauty in the dead, as Walt Whitman did. It means trying to learn to love after coming of age surrounded only by horror.
It means you shouldn't read this book if you're down.
But it also means you should read it.
It means you can't see beauty in the dead, as Walt Whitman did. It means trying to learn to love after coming of age surrounded only by horror.
It means you shouldn't read this book if you're down.
But it also means you should read it.
July 5, 2014
It's all too rare I am moved by the majority of poems in any poetry collection, but I am with this one. So many beautiful, powerful poems. The Ledger, Growing Up in Bergen-Belsen, Via Negativa, For Those Held Captive For Decades in Darkness, Goats, Infidelity, Carolina Grasshoppers, From the Mouth to the Source, Road Kill... Not always easy reading, emotionally, as war is Nutter's primary subject here, but so worthwhile.
June 29, 2010
Nutter takes on war poetry, and creates a powerful collection that resonates long after you've finished reading it. These poems are, in one sense, about justice or lack thereof. Nutter challenges Whitman's lyrical take on the bodies of dead soldiers slumbering peacefully under the pastoral landscape, and reminds us of the real violence and horror of war.
June 21, 2011
This is rough and powerful. One poem made me cry on the bus in front of strangers. My best advice, besides being prepared for brutal war stories from several conflicts in technicolor, is read it twice. Some of her phrases don't catch you until the second time you read them, then they make you swear out loud because they catch you off guard. Good work, Jude.
November 21, 2011
I purchased this book because I loved "The Insect Collector's Demise" when I read it in a "best of" collection. There were a couple others in this collection I enjoyed, but the author's constant focuse on grim deaths greatly reduced my enjoyment of her work. I'm not a poetry aficionado, so I can't appreciate it for the sake of the art.
September 13, 2009
Brilliantly done. I admire that Ms. Nutter doesn't compartmentalize - death and sex and war and love run through each poem.
April 25, 2010
I can't say enough good about this book. One of my favorite books of poetry by far.
June 14, 2011
I've been in a poetry group for four years and Nutter's book was the most admired work we've read. Her ability to delve into the horrors of war in a personal way are unmatched. Magnificent.
March 27, 2013
Uninteresting.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews