Synopses & Reviews
A young soldier dons Napoleons 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.
Coupled with Schutts own voice are the voices of some of Italys most prominent nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets including Giacomo Leopardi, Alda Merini, Eugenio Montale, and Edoardo Sanguineti. Subtle, discerning, restrained, the poems in Westerly probe a vast emotional geography, with its contingent pleasures and pains, “where the doors always dark, the sky still blue.”
…some narrow sickness buried you.
Whatever boyhood I had
fate hijacked too. Old friend, is this that
world we stayed awake all night for?
Truth dropped in. Far off,
your cool hand points the way.
Review
"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
Review
“Everything in [Westerly] heralds a seriously important career.”—Publishers Weekly
Review
“The latest winner of the venerable Yale Younger Poets Prize turns out to be terse, well-traveled, resolutely unfashionable, and, finally, wise.”—Publishers Weekly Publishers Weekly
Review
“Schutts debut investigates death, life, and language with the intimate precision of a painters attention to a still life.”—Booklist
Review
“The poems in Westerly explore dark existential territory with a kind of shimmering intelligence, and Schutts imagery is unexpected and beautifully wrought.”—Maria Browning, Chapter 16
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“Westerly marks the debut of a poet whose skill on the page will continue to point our way forward.”—Blackbird
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“[Schutt] loves his vices more than his virtues . . . Westerly is a tour de force.”—William Logan, The New Criterion Blackbird
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“Schutts debut collection gathers disparate strands into a tightly bound weave.”—John Casteen, Virginia Quarterly Review
Review
Winner of the Jeannette Haien Ballard Writers' Prize for 2014, an annual prize given to young writers of proven excellence in poetry or prose.
Synopsis
Will Schutt is the 2012 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition
Synopsis
Will Schutt is the 2012 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition
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 nati
Synopsis
Praised by Carl Phillips as “a book of uncommon wisdom,” Schutt’s prize-winning first volume of poetry displays a cosmopolitan range of reference and a meditative, understated style.
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.