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| Kevin Cutrer |
Poems
by Kevin Cutrer
Dos
Madres Press Inc.
Loveland,
Ohio
ISBN:
978-1-948017-31-2
35
Pages
Review
by Dennis Daly
Never
underestimate the power of exuberance. Never, never underestimate the
creative power of love’s exuberance. Kevin Cutrer’s new book
Mudanca sings a melody of love like nothing I’ve heard in years.
Can this be the return of courtly love? The poet’s words radiate
authenticity as they reel through an emotional cross-cultural ether.
Art, metrics, all of it fade into the distant background as Cutrer
pulses out his evanescent, barely containable, joy.
Mispronunciations
and other verbal missteps made by Cutrer’s persona in the opening
poem, To the Woman for Whom He Is Learning Portuguese, become gentle
love tokens as the poet woos and assures his lover that she is indeed
his muse. Hilarity and amorous self-deprecation rule as the poem
begins,
You
must write about me. I’m your Moose!
O
Moose, sing to me of the man who ordered pizza
by
asking the waitress for a spanking, extra cheese.
The
man who said, when introduced to your mother,
I
am so pleased to meet you… Carrot.
Those
are garlic bulbs that were my eyes.
The
cheap dictionary turns roach faster
than
you can say Gregor Samsa, scurries off,
and
with it any hope of telling the barber not
to short.
Cutrer,
like all true lovers, considers separation from his lover anathema.
His world also shrinks into the original garden, where he as Adam and
his lover as Eve reign again as the center of the animate world. In
the poem entitled Sepatos Cutrer laments the loneliness, even if
temporary, which often plagues new-found love,
I
can’t help feeling like some article
you
didn’t need and didn’t pack,
like
this pair of sneakers you abandoned
to
the cold tiles of the bedroom floor.
At
least they make one pair. I’m only one.
What
will you wear on your bakery walk,
your
morning quest for pao
doce?
Will
I have the appetite to breakfast alone?
I
sit on the edge of our bed staring
at
the blue canvas, the laces gray
with
street dust, and my slouch deepens.
I
touch the laces and say sapos,
my
apprentice tongue transforming shoes
into
toads, and off they hop…
With
love comes magic. Cutrer, given a mango by his beloved, discovers its
inherent enchantment. His lover as a child would race her sisters to
the mango tree, then climb to its heights in an effort to win
nature’s succulent prize. The poet succumbs to his muse
and
imagines it in this charming way,
I
see you perched on a branch
the
marmosets fled in fright of you,
gloating
as you hold your trophy aloft,
Stone-hearted
tear larger than a heart,
And
your sisters grunt their way toward you.
With
a shining blade you trim off
whirligigs
of mango peels
letting
them drop…drop…your eyes falling
after
them, past Eva, past Alba, landing
on
roots that spill like the tresses of a witch’s
head
of hair, root twining over root,
sprawled
on the earth like petrified fire.
Perfect
love songs say nothing. They simply tag an internal, searing need to
available words that provide life-enhancing rhythms. Those rhythms
can convey insuppressible joy or unendurable sadness. In his
wonderfully written poem entitled Yes, Cutrer does both. He takes his
reader from the rarified freedom of physical health through the
flickering whispers of sedentary illness. Or from timelessness to a
ticking clock. Here are a few of the poet’s more joyous lines,
Something
in me said say
yes,
say
yes,
and so I said yes, yes,
let’s dance.
On
the floor you giggled at what I called
my
moves
and kissed me for pity’s sake.
Can
I see you again? Yes. Move in with me? Yes.
Yes
to Brazil and the dilatory days.
Yes
to Boston and the deciduous years.
Yes
to anywhere and anywhen with you.
A
lover often adores items associated with his beloved. Cutrer praises
his Brazilian lady by lauding her birth county’s currency. Each
detail seems in bas relief. Each color nourishes a new beginning. He
marvels at the wonders provided to him in compensation for his simple
teaching chores,
And
like a stall in the ark each bill houses
a
subject of the animal kingdom.
A
macaw peers with piratical eye.
A
jaguar drapes her arm across a branch.
Sea
turtles soar in a blue bay, frayed
in
the interchange from hand to hand,
folded
three-fold upon itself and stuffed
into
a man’s shirt pocket, showing through the white.
I
earn my weekly menagerie
preaching
the verb to
be.
Mudanca, a
Brazilian word for change and this collection’s title poem,
chronicles love’s transformative powers. Cutrer conjures up
grade-school embarrassments and subsequent long-standing fears.
Typical stuff but, nevertheless, traumatic. An early attempt at
dancing takes a disastrous turn. Even his school teacher shows
distain. Ouch! But all of this is a setup to showcase love’s
exhilarating intervention,
…You
ask
if
I like to dance. Something in me
says
say
yes, say yes.
So, I say yes.
It
is all happening now
all
in one moment
my
first disastrous dance
our
last I cannot see
in
whatever catastrophe
awaits
us to part us
some
other where in time
I
try not dare not think
but
how can I not when
I
awake and wake you
kiss
the dark spot
on
your finger one
more
time one more turn
in
the dance we began
that
evening in Somerville…
Yes,
dear readers, there are still troubadours among us. Cutrer, with this
short, lovely collection, confirms it.
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