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.
