Passages/ Passaggi by Laurence Hutchman

Out of nothingness, the world

Passages is a breathtaking, new poetry collection by Canadian poet Laurence Hutchman. Written in English and translated into Italian by Angela D’Ambra, it spans decades of the poet’s writing from 1975 to the present. In chronological sections: Explorations, Blue Rider, Foreign National, Emery and Beyond Borders, these poems give voice to the ever-morphing and vanishing nature of reality and the ensuing longing for that shape-shifting time and place. Our bodies move through time, but poetic observation leads us to discover that “the center of the world is everywhere and the sky is as blue as it was in the beginning/ a clear pastel eternity/ this is the moment when the picture lifts out of the canvas, swirls back into the cosmos of the creator’s heart.”

In the Oxford dictionary definition, passages are “narrow ways allowing access between places: through, under, over or past something on the way from one place to another,” although they can also allude to texts of writing. Indeed these poems weave in and out of the present moment to journeys ofmemory in life’s most memorable locations and people. They inform us that “we are forms/ shifting perspectives of Escher and Chagall. Towards form’s unaccustomed continent/ the blue rider” travels “to enter the luminous genesis of symmetry and planes” while “infinitesimal stars shimmer in a matrix sea.” Centered in the here and now, the poet, “a foreign national,” dreams of returning to his beloved Ireland, looks “upon the blue and pink shell -the genesis of all we know. Because you must take your family with you/ we are always looking for that beginning/ that first moment we mouth our names/ when we hear voices and we know they are us.”

Laurence Hutchman’s poetry is steeped in layers of erudite poetic knowledge and tradition.His words bloom out from the personal to embrace the universal, never giving in to the passing fads of minimalism or experimental forms, but gracing us with the refreshing essence of that quintessential poetry we were thirsting for. “Sounds ripen in the mouth/ the words break in me/ touching the page they dissolve the lines/ ofmy mother’s handwriting/ change into weather/ the lonely excitement of windy beaches/ sea grass, kelp, the briny smell.” This is rich, sensorial language. Each line is an experience to savour, to revel in. We are transported from the words on
the page to places and faces where “things turn into one another/ silver dulcimers/ red diamonds/sapphire waves” and like The Glass Blower, the poet “molds the air into clear forms/ poised in the center/ draws shapes out of wilderness/ inspires perfect rhythms,” because in reality there are nothing but ever shifting forms of matter and consciousness. “There are no blue souvenir lions/ no frozen tiger-angel fish/ but light/ form/ and energy.” Here in these poems “the plants and trees become words/ the hills and ponds/ the heart and eyes.” Even the steam rising from a coffee cup transforms into “a mist from a still lake/blue-gold ideograms/figures of life: house, man, woman, child” and while you drink your coffee “you drink the world.” The evanescence of forms, like steam from a cup, rises in and out of being. How beautiful and heartbreaking it is to realize this.

Laurence Hutchman is a seasoned poet and lover of poetry. His mind is a profuse, living repository of literary knowledge, which transpires and fuels his depictions of reality with sublime poesis. His poems are Zen-like meditations. “To practice poems, you must hold the spoon more consciously than you would a pen/ feel your lips around it/ sounds/ shapes/ textured flavours/ how it takes them from the earth into you.” Everything around us is rife with potentialities, with meaning. Even in the seeming nothingness ofsnow covered fields, we are led to see “a mathematical precision/ which covers the earth in frozen solutions/ across the tabula rasa/ deeper into the shifting planes/ fine logarithms/ musical phrases/ a wonderful amnesia.”

I could read these poems over and over again. They are contemplations, keys to unlocking everyday reality through our senses: through “the refrigerator humming/ the syncopation of the clock/ the midnight bus braking/ the warming up of the orchestra.” They teach us that we are always “strangers walking by the sea. That we must be “on the edge/ be near the power/ not the guardian of thought, but the reader,” where “the piano plays softly like a cardiogram/ to relearn the world/ to forget and welcome.”

Memory plays an important part in this collection. These are poems that restring the past to the present moment. I can see my father standing with me. A stranger becomes resonance for mother -everyone a repetition of the same consciousness perhaps, notes of the same symphony. The love of kin and place is palpable in these lines: “the way fishermen have traveled for centuries in the systole and diastole of the sea.” We hear “the loving, dipping rhythms/ the rising and falling of vowels.” The poet is one with the landscape and the language of his motherland.

I felt the evanescent precariousness of life against the recurring refrains of The Night Has A Clear Sanity About It, where “the wind blows coldly against me” the only constant certainty in a world that can be “a desolate adobe;” where someone talking to a bartender “looks like my father” and “someone lights a cigarette,” while “a lonely truck rushes beneath the underpass”
as“the moon drifts.”

The book ends with the poem We Are Searching For A Place, in which “we keep going back to the beginning to search and grasp for our own meaning,” where “myths are being played out/until we find the strands of thought/ love in the voice of many-tongued words/ in the midst of chaos/ carrying ancestors/ clarity of their maps within our genes/ encoded now/ we grasp.”

The circularity of life, unending, eternal in these poems, beckons us through passages to our own humanity. As in Basho’s tree, the poet leads us to become the tree, to merge with the world we are observing. In their reverence of the observed, these poems pay homage to the family and place that spawned us, as well as to all the realms we have traveled through, both physically and in memory, to whom we owe our genesis in the world. These poems weave a nest of words and meaning in which to belong and ultimately survive.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Independently published (May 1 2022)
Language ‏ : ‎ Italian
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 202 pages
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 979-8815125100

Josie Di Sciascio-Andrews

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Josie Di Sciascio-Andrews has written seven collections of poetry and two non-fiction books. Her work appears in various journals and anthologies among which: Canadian Literature, The Malahat Review, Descant, The Canada Literary Review, Acta Victoriana, Canadian Poetry Review, The Blue Nib and Lothalorian among others. Her poetry has recently won an international prize in Rome’s Citta Del Galateo Contest. As well, her poem “The First Time I Heard Leonard Cohen” was nominated for the 2022 Pushcart Prize. Her latest book of poems, Meta Stasis, was released in June 2021 by Mosaic Press. Josie is a member of The League of Canadian Poets, the Ontario Poetry Society, the Italian Canadian Writers Association and The Heliconian Club for Women in the Literary Arts. She teaches workshops for Poetry in Voice and is the host & coordinator of The Oakville Literary Cafe series.