The Book of Names: New and Selected Poems

The Book of Names: New and Selected Poems (1993) is a collection of poetry by American writer Barton Sutter. The 50-plus poems that comprise this volume celebrate the rural North Country—its stark beauty, its earthy people, its lush woodlands and abundant waterways, its old farmsteads, and its roadside saloons—and plumb the eternal mysteries of romance, loss, and renewal. The result is a love letter to the Upper Midwest, written by a native son who embraces his unique and inexorable ties to the land. The Book of Names received the 1994 Minnesota Book Award for Poetry.

Sutter avoids flowery and over-the-top language, instead keeping his words genuine and unadorned, much like the subjects of his poems. Still, his verses are muscular in both beauty and meaning, swelling with the pride the poet feels in his homeplace and packing vibrant, potent energy and imagery, often with just a few well-chosen words.

In many of the poems collected here, Sutter takes an interest in the magical aspects of natural events—events that often go unnoticed during the ebb and flow of the everyday. Take the poem "Hoarfrost and Fog," for instance. As he trudges through a foot of snow in subzero temperatures, the poet suddenly takes note of his breath, which he admits is something he doesn't usually notice. Then, he encounters a woman utterly enchanted by the winterscape surrounding them, and she asks him to take her picture. As Sutter photographs her amid the confluence of hoarfrost and fog and snow, he too sees the rare beauty of such a weather event, and appreciating it anew, returns to his breath. The world, Sutter seems to say, is full of exciting, almost mystical new discoveries, even in the ordinariness of a winter day or in the rhythmic familiarity of the breath rising and falling, rising and falling.



While a love of the land courses through the poems of The Book of Names, so too does a more romantic kind of love. And, it too, is something the poet experiences most profoundly in the daily goings-on of life. In "Static," Sutter speaks to a departed lover, whose absence he feels most acutely when he does the laundry: "Well, Old Flame, the fire’s out./ I miss you most at the laundromat./ Folding sheets is awkward work/ Without your help." But Sutter works through his grief in this brief poem, acknowledging the loss of a love but also grateful to have to no longer endure "those gaudy arguments that wore us out." In the end, he talks about running his hand over the now-empty place in the bed they used to share, creating sparks that crackle across the blanket. It is just the common phenomenon of static cling, but from Sutter's perspective, it is a trail of romantic sparks, with nowhere to go, crackling and dying out.

The poem "I Love Your Crazy Bones" is an ode to a lover who stayed. "I love your teeth, crazy bones,/ Madcap knees and elbows./ Forearm and backhand," Sutter writes. His connection to the earth also wends its way through these affections, imaging the small of his lover's back pooling rain "into water a man might drink" and "the moons on the nails of all ten toes/ Rising and setting inside your shoes."

In addition to natural majesty and romantic love, physical structures and their meaning also fall under Sutter's lens. In "Shoe Shop," he writes of a shoe store seemingly from another world. As the poet shuts the door "on the racket/ Of rush hour traffic," he feels as if he's walked into some old-fashioned dream, the air thick with "leather and pipe tobacco." He has an animated conversation with the old cobbler working at the store, who laments everything from shoe factories to inflation. Nevertheless, Sutter can't help but marvel at the satisfaction the man must feel at working with his hands, at having the opportunity to channel his passion and his talent into the heft of the hammer. By the time Sutter leaves the shop, it is now the outside world that feels like a dream, "the city looks flimsy as a movie set."



The Book of Names is playful as well. "The Third Use of the Penis," for example, is not at all the poem you might initially assume it to be. It is a tribute to the un-answerability of some questions, how certain mysteries will always remain unsolved. There is both comfort and terror in that fact, but these puzzles, Sutter asserts, are "good to think upon." By thinking on them, we surrender to the mystery, and in the surrender lies the beauty.

Ultimately, the poems in The Book of Names defy easy categorization. They aren't mere "nature poems." They touch on something universal and true. They speak to what it means to be alive and to find beauty in that aliveness—whether in the bend of a river or in the mundanity of daily life, whether in the beginning (or end) of love or in the perpetual inscrutability of human life.