Westerly (Yale Series of Younger Poets)
Selected by Carl Phillips, author most recently of Silverchest (2013), as the recipient of the Yale Younger Poets Prize, Schutt’s debut investigates death, life, and language with the intimate precision of a painter’s attention to a still life. From the “lambent apricot” of an oddly warm dawn in January to “purple bargain chiffon,” Schutt renders physicality with delicate intensity and exquisite simile: a museumgoer, learning of religious unrest in Egypt, slides a newspaper into his pocket “like a curved blade in a sheath.” As a kind of intermission between the book’s major movements, Schutt inserts translations of renowned Italian poets, including the twentieth-century masters Eugenio Montale and Edoardo Sanguineti. Schutt also includes allusions to both Elizabeth Bishop and Walt Whitman but does well not to sentimentalize his literary heritage. Rather, the poems seek to accept the passage of time, the change of tide. “The past,” one speaker admits, “appears clearly, riddled with wrong measurements.” In this way, Schutt’s work moves west, toward death, toward the Occident, both collapsing, one into the other. --Diego Báez