Poems
by Kevin Cutrer
Dos
Madres Press
Loveland,
Ohio
www.dosmadres.com
ISBN:
978-1-939929-49-5
71
Pages
Review
by Dennis Daly
Like
a 2 X 4 to the head Kevin Cutrer’s new poetry collection, Lord’s
Own Anointed, gets your attention fast. Set in rural Louisiana,
Cutrer’s lyrics preach everyday Southern life writ both large and
small. He marbles in pointed comedy and homespun wisdom. His subject
matter is the human condition and his regional angle works
wonderfully well. The riveting drawings by Rob Fairburn, who hails
from the same small town as Cutrer, capture the poet’s tone
perfectly.
From
the opening poem, entitled Sounding Out, Cutrer harnesses a wide
range of emotions to buttress his mature arguments. Here he narrates
his persona’s travails as a slow learner and, concomitantly, the
rote methods used by his scowling, scary, overworked teacher. His
mother supplied the antidote of love and patience. Listen to these
first affecting, then magical lines,
I
don’t know how others learned
but
in my case my mother taught me
into
the evening… a boiling cauldron
of
butterbeans on the stove, that hated meal
which
nourished me whether I wanted it or not;
the
phone ringing so loud, so often, I thought
it
would lose its voice the way I could shout
my
own away. A sound that smarted, the little clang
lingered
in my ears like a burn. The business line.
Even
as she repeated yes and no
to
the caller, she tapped the page gently
where
I should pencil in, with one
of
those thick, soft-pointed pencils
given
to children (Merlin’s wand at playtime)
letters
that spelled my primer’s totems,
the
cat and dog, the happy family.
Lord’s
Own Anointed, Cutrer’s title poem and my favorite piece in this
collection, does double duty, detailing the divine madness of
preacher and poet. Henry Hebert, the protagonist, is not quite right.
Not unlike a few poets that I know. Bug-eyed and bulbous, Henry
proffers an absurd appearance. But he has “the spirit” and his
words matter. Cutrer concludes the piece describing pure artistry
generically this way,
Our
preacher calls on him to pray each Sunday,
and
every time he has a different prayer
more
blessed than any message that young pastor
with
all his years at college could invent.
He
prays with all the energy a workingman
puts
to his pillow every night to sleep,
that
hard-won peace that only comes from struggle.
His
words step slowly like a man who winds
on
through the wilderness without a trail,
sure
of the right way, moving tree to tree,
humming
to free his spirit from the thick,
and
sentence after sentence simply sings.
If
it wasn’t so horribly sad, Cutrer’s poem entitled Fall On Your
Knees would be hilariously funny. Santa Claus shows up at Shorty’s
Tavern, a local bar, jolting childhood memories from the protagonist,
who is drinking up a storm. A father/ son relationship hangs in the
balance. Mortality and life’s meaning (if any) are considered. I
teared up reading the last stanza of this poem. That’s a first. I
won’t spoil it by quoting; it needs the whole poem. Here’s
another section addressing Santa Claus at the heart of the piece,
You
know, my father always wanted us to believe
in
you, and every year he had a scheme
to
put out all our doubts once and for all.
One
Christmas morning there were reindeer tracks
out
in the front yard where the grass was thin
and
it was muddy from a thunderstorm.
Well,
that was all the proof it took for me.
Later
I learned he’d sawed a hoof from a buck
his
buddy killed, to fake those tracks. He went
to
all that trouble just to fool his kids.
Brother
love can be a complicated affair. In the piece Phil Kills the
Neighbor’s Dog on Easter Sunday, Cutrer infuses his versified
argument with passion, shame, and internalized anger (You can
literally feel the acid burn.). Then he nails it. Consider these
concluding lines,
There
wasn’t any call for it,
but
there it was. You can’t pretend
it
hadn’t happened when you’d seen it.
Forgiveness
is a lie we tell.
Sometimes
there ain’t no other way
To
live, but live by lies we tell.
After
what he’d done, what to do?
The
men, we just stood around and spit.
The
women tore him up like panthers.
Perhaps
the strangest poem in the collection is Truck Stop Chapel Testimony.
It works as both a page poem and a performance poem. In fact I’ve
seen the poet read this piece at the Hastings Room Reading Series in
Cambridge Massachusetts. During the performance he morphed into a
latter-day Elmer Gantry, stretching his repentant hands out of
hellfire towards heaven and undeserved redemption. Cutrer’s
preacher rails against the Prince of Darkness,
Sins
are hard-headed, my repentance limp.
I’d
turn a week’s pay into a letter to Penthouse,
then
weep clean the taint of my crimes, and worse:
I’d
skip and sing the wide road back to go romp.
From
his couch stained with evil, Satan-times-3
addles
me to bad my good, turn rights to wrongs.
He
holds my steel will-power in his tongs
to
weld all kinds of wickedness to me.
After reading this
volume, grace (or presumptuousness) from the almighty (or the
infernal one) descended (or ascended) upon me and I immediately
reserved a retreat room in a Cistercian monastery located in the
American South to deal once and for all with my unholy shortcomings.
Cutrer is that good.
