Jude Nutter Livres

Exploring the profound theme of silence, this collection delves into the gap between expression and experience, highlighting the paradox of art creation. The author draws from her two-month Antarctic experience to examine various dimensions of silence, including death, loneliness, and the complexities of childhood perceptions. The poems navigate the silence of lost things, addiction, and the isolation faced by explorers, ultimately portraying silence as a force that inspires creativity rather than opposes it. Through this lens, the work invites readers to reflect on the nature of existence and expression.

Through a poignant exploration of war and conflict, Jude Nutter's poetry collection confronts Walt Whitman's reflections on the casualties of the American Civil War. With a voice that oscillates between sorrowful and vivid imagery, Nutter articulates her deep emotional responses, ultimately challenging Whitman's assertion that the fallen fit seamlessly into the landscape. Her work captures the complexities of grief and remembrance, providing a powerful counter-narrative to the glorification of war.

Dead reckoning—used by navigators to calculate their position using a record of speed, drift, and the direction travelled relative to a last known location—is the metaphor at the heart of Jude Nutter’s fourth collection, where poems are constantly plotting new positions of departure as they reach back into both human and geological history. Deeply philosophical, the sustained, complex narratives of Dead Reckoning stay grounded in (and through) the body, and reach outward from various locations in time and space as they contemplate fossils and cave art, the landscapes of Europe haunted by war, the feral world of loss, and those points in childhood when “Eden” was ruptured by an awareness of sexuality and history. Following the literal and metaphorical reverberations of these journeys, this collection, which is both a record and a guide, asks us to contemplate how we locate ourselves in, and lay claim to, our own lives.