Will Schutt's first collection of poems ranges widely, touching here and there on the Pacific Coast, Italy, the Indian-named towns of Wisconsin and the Rhode Island outpost of its title--perhaps because he recognizes that
"Not everyone who dreams, dreams the beach.
For a while dead-ends are in vogue. For a while
open, uncharted cities...."
Westerly, the 2012 selection in the Yale Series of Younger Poets, reflects the work of a leisurely observer tripped up by the heartbreak and irony he sees, one who can say with the wisdom of an older poet: "We live so strangely, in love with visions,/ scared of the invisible."
Schutt's poems often find their way fleetingly to fatherhood and family, as in a translation of the Italian poet Edoardo Sanguineti or an original poem like "American Window Dressing." Just as family bears a certain sadness, so, in "Louise's Story," a squirrel's "idiot dance up a tree" becomes more about the tired tree than the squirrel: "One sad-looking thing making another something happy./ Sometimes it's just us ruffling the leaves."
If Schutt's collection carries a tone of melancholy, it is tempered by an equal sense of possibility. The title poem leaves us in a place "where nirvana is a long time/ coming, or untidy, unresolved,/ the way stupid hope won't shut up." With eyes wide open but still "in love with visions," that is not a bad place to be. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.