Cotton Grass

The natural world has been a major source of inspiration for Bart Sutter's poetry for more than half a century, during which he has explored the backroads, trails, rivers, lakes, and bogs of the North, returning with vivid reports of otters eating golden walleyes, a big bull moose groaning for love, and the memorable music of a field full of bobolinks.

Cotton Grass also bears witness to the allure of nature in urban settings. Sutter has drawn beauty and insight from the woodsy environs of his home overlooking Lake Superior: a fox appears at a summer big-band concert; a raccoon relaxes in the hole he's ripped through a roof, gazing round "like a soldier from the turret of a tank"; a pair of lovers find an emblem for their daring as they watch a falcon fold its wings and hurtle headlong toward the pavement.

This retrospective collection reveals that, all along, Bart Sutter has resisted contemporary trends and gone his own way, listening for what each poem wanted to be, mastering a remarkable range of tones and forms from celebration to lamentation, from long-lined free verse to haiku, from love lyrics to prophecy, from ballad to sonnet, from story to song.

Pulitzer Prize winner Stephen Dunn called this poetry "light years away (thank God) from post-modern tactics; one might even say Sutter's aesthetic is pre-modern. There are many poems with rhyme and meter, an unabashed celebration of nature, and most amazingly, a healthy sampling of what we see little of these days, the affirmative poem."