Westerly

Schutt Will, Phillips Carl

A young soldier dons Napoleon's hat. An out-of-work man wanders Berlin, dreaming he is Peter the Great. The famous exile Dante finally returns to his native city to "hang his crown of laurels up". Familial and historical apparitions haunt this dazzling collection of poems by Will Schutt, the 2012 recipient of the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets award. Schutt's poems probe a vast emotional geography, and he expands their scope with elegant translations of works by some of Italy's most prominent twentieth-century poets. Contest judge Carl Phillips calls Schutt's debut volume "a book of uncommon wisdom", and he finds in the poems "Not only beauty, but a persuasive insight into what I call the lived life, the one that risks knowing what's difficult, despite the sorrow that so often follows the knowing".

About the Author

Will Schutt's poems and translations have appeared in "Agni", "A Public Space", "FIELD", "The Southern Review", and elsewhere. The recipient of fellowships from the Stadler Center for Poetry and the James Merrill House, he currently lives in New York City.

Reviews

"Will Schutt's 'Westerly' takes on nothing less than, on the one hand, the ways in which we, the living, both late and soon, make our stumbling way westward, mostly oblivious to the fact of mortality and, on the other hand, how the dead make their resonant way back to us, sometimes as memory, sometimes as guide directing us toward and through the inevitable... This is a book of uncommon wisdom... Its poems sustain me. They give me hope – which may very well be, among gifts, the one we need most" – Carl Phillips

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