Swimming Towards the Sun: Collected Poems 1968-2020 [Paperback]

On Selected Poems Laurence Hutchman's poetry is a witness to the world around him, to the patterns of families, nations, and landscape. He hears Mozart in the supermarket, and Nelligan breaking into song. While there's a refreshingly outward-looking documentary zeal in his poetry, transformations abound: a typewriter becomes a 'silent temple,' a baseball glove a 'leather flower,' a forest a 'way of going into myself.' With this selection from his previous books, it's clearer than ever how Hutchman's mix of curiosity-driven realism and metaphorical surprise gives his poetry generosity and scope. Brian Bartlett On Reading the Water Laurence Hutchman, a key figure in Maritime poetry, expands our delight in knowing the world and loving life. His insightful poems record a life well lived in humour and seriousness. He allows the language to sing with the force of his own deep music. With unassuming wisdom, humanity and tenderness, Hutchman celebrates the people and spiritual landscapes of our contemporary life. Liliane Welch Laurence Hutchman writes for the voice, composing by cadence, and making full use of the musical possibilities of gesture, echo, repetition and variation. Motion, especially but not solely as music and dance, is a recurrent figure in his poetry, and his imagery is often kinesthetic as well synaesthetically visl7