Links to my books at The Internet Archive:
Anniversarius: The Book of Autumn
Now in its fourth edition and vastly expanded, Anniversarius: The Book of Autumn is Brett Rutherford’s 40-poem epic cycle of autumn-themed poems. Although there is plenty of Shelley, Poe, and Bradbury here in the celebration of “autumn’s being,” this cycle encompasses works that are mythic, metaphysical, political, satirical and, of course, supernatural.
Autumn becomes the landscape for Jan Palach’s suicide in Soviet-invaded Czechoslovakia in 1969; for translations of Pushkin and Hugo; and for rhapsodic and moody invocations of fall in Western Pennsylvania (the poet’s birthplace) and haunted New England (his adopted home). Greek myth comes in by way of a hymn to Rhea, the Oak Tree Goddess, an encounter with three oak nymphs, and a dinner party in Hades.
Rutherford walks in the footsteps of Poe in New York City, and sets two other powerful poems in Manhattan: one a panorama of historic Madison Square Park, and a troubled visit in the aftermath of 9/11.
Influenced by Poe, Shelley, Whitman, Jeffers, Hugo, Bradbury, and Greek classics, these poems present a cosmos tinged with autumnal sadness, yet they are brave with the delight in a life fully relished down to the last falling leaf. Although solitude and loss stalk through these pages, there are also poems expressing a defiant, transcendent spirit. Each of the two “Rings” of the work ends with powerful affirmation. The locales of the latest poems include New York, Providence, rural Pennsylvania, the planets Mars and Pluto, and Ming Dynasty China.
This book is meant to be relished slowly, to be read aloud and savored for music as well as meaning. Each poem stands alone as an “anniversary,” yet the cycle as a whole is Romantic in sweep, its structure like that of two successive long symphonies.
This landmark of autumnal poetry is available for free download in PDF format.
This is the companion volume to The Gods As They Are, On Their Planets, containing the remainder of that 2005 book's poems, many revised and expanded for this new edition, and newly typeset and illustrated. A set of poems from the poet’s childhood and young years in Pennsylvania, provokes the reader to re-think “imaginary playmates,” to re-live the anguish of doomed obsessions, and to revel in tree, forest, lake, and graveyard in his “first-found home.” Another sequence of love poems are sad, astronomical, haunted, and transcendental, culminating in the challenging poem “Triptych.” This book, containing poems written or revised between 1991 and 2004 in New York City and in Providence, RI, first appeared in 2005, released simultaneously in print and as a free PDF download. More than 15,000 copies were distributed to a world-wide audience.
This book’s title-poem — a small recollection of a hungry boy meeting his grandmother for a secret feast of saltine crackers and butter — is a metaphor for the book itself: a feast of poetic narratives and visions that the reader can savor, indulging in “just one more” until the last page is turned. Two story-poems come from the Pennsylvania landscape: the tale of Pittsburgh’s radioactive millionaire who haunts Allegheny Cemetery, and the childhood memory of a visiting Rabbi who makes a Golem-monster in rural Scottdale. The feast, however, also spans continents and era, as the poet takes us to the grave of Leonardo da Vinci in France, the exhumation of Goethe’s body in Weimar, a flamingo sacrifice by the Emperor Nero, ancient Alexandrian gossip about ibises, and a shattering visit to the home of Emily Dickinson in Amherst. Sometimes the poems inhabit a strange, visionary world, overhearing a prayer on Cyprus from a hunted archbishop, visioning Eldorado rising from a glacial lake, or penetrating the psychology of the Egyptian Pharaoh Snofru. A cluster of nature poems from Edinboro Lake in Northwestern Pennsylvania, and some melancholy contemplations on “The Loved Dead,” round out this collection of 40 poems.Poems from Providence - 20th Anniversary Edition.
Poems from Providence, a huge compendium of all the poems Rutherford created during his first years in Providence, Rhode Island (1985-88), was published in 1991. This great blossoming of neo-Romantic work was inspired by a change of locale to New England, by H.P. Lovecraft, and a deep immersion in the classical world, yielding the long "Ganymede" cycle, a prequel to The Iliad. Other memorable works in this paperback are "The Outsider," an elegy for Barbara A. Holland, Treblinka's "Ivan the Terrible," "The God's Eye: A Summer Diary" tracing a return to native haunts in Pennsylvania, the cat memorial poems to Thunderpuss, and the first appearance of the now-famous poem, "At Lovecraft's Grave." Illustrated with line-drawings by Pieter Vanderbeck.
To commemorate the 20th Anniversary of this volume, the poet has revised a number of the poems, and added six poems that are centered in or around Providence, including new Lovecraft poems and the Poe Providence mystery narrative poem, "Lucy."
Here is Brett Rutherford’s first new compendium of poems in seven years. Following on The Gods As They Are On Their Planets (2005) and Poems from Providence (1991), this book is a must for fans of this neo-Romantic American poet.
The 94 new poems and revisions in this collection range from a dark-shadowed childhood in the coal and coke region of Western Pennsylvania, to New York City and Providence, Rhode Island. The jolting sequence titled “Out Home” is a poetic memoir of broken families and childhood terrors, and the imminent threat of kidnapping and mutilation by “Doctor Jones,” a crazed surgeon who roams the countryside in a sinister roadster. The small boy of these poems is already a self-styled outsider, defining his difference from the crushing environment around him.
In “Past the Millennium” and “Ars Poetica,” the full-grown poet soars, with politically-charged poems on Solzhenitsyn, the self-immolation of Czech martyr Jan Palach, and the imagined overtaking of Bush and Cheney by “The Black Huntsman.” Rutherford walks in Poe’s footsteps on a Hudson River pier, visits ancient Rome for a chat with the lawgiving King Numa Pompilius, and puts Poe to work tracking down a cemetery spectre in 1848 Providence. Two historic verse plays give voice to the mad Carlota, Empress of Mexico, and two Austrian policemen with an unexpected prisoner on their hands.
Humor abounds in this volume, too, from the possessed sex toys in “A Night in Eddie’s Apartment,” skeptical Martians refusing to believe there’s life on Earth, nine-year-old Dante meeting Beatrice in Providence’s Federal Hill, and a surrealist adventure across Europe as a lost sock-puppet searches for its owner, meeting Sigmund Freud along the way.
A sequence of poems on Love and Eros titled “Love Spells” plumbs the depths of desire and obsession, and presents several powerful elegies, culminating with the poignant “The Loft on Fourteenth Street.” The erotic poems, some set in Ancient Greece and some in the present, are frank and often amusing, perhaps some comfort for those who think the fun ends at thirty.
Ending the book is a clump of supernatural poems, as expected from this heir of Poe and Lovecraft: a story-length poem, “Dawn,” presents the ennui of a 300-year-old vampire; the birth and education of the feared witch Keziah Mason; wind elementals attack the headquarters of Bain Capital in Boston; and Elder Gods arrive to make humans their playthings.
An Expectation of Presences is a wide-ranging and startling collection, romantic, defiant, and bracingly hopeful.
This book is Brett Rutherford's farewell to his adopted city, Providence, where he lived most of the years between 1985 and 2015, with intervals away at Boston, New York, and Northern New Jersey. It is also his farewell to H.P.Lovecraft fandom, with two biting poems, "The Special Ward at Butler Hospital" and "On the Island of Pohnpei," the latter about a sinister hookah bar in the South Pacific that becomes the center of Lovecraft tourism. This small but lethal book also contains two powerful narrative poems about women at two ends of the power spectrum: a schoolgirl in colonial New England falls prey to a vicious schoolmaster in "Hoxie House," while "Young Girl's Prayer to Eos, At Corinth" is a whole new twist on the power some women have for magic and revenge, if they choose to use it. "What She Was Like" is a Hitchcockian mother portrait from Pennsylvania that could just as well have come from Salem. Translations and adaptations in this slender volume include four poems adapted from the Chinese poet Li Yu, doomed last Emperor of Southern Tang, and an adaptation of Pushkin's supernatural poem, "The Demons." The title poem is an attempt to enter into the psyche and society of those extinct masters of the world, the Trilobites. These new poems and revisions are from 2013-2014.
The Gods As They Are, On Their Planets
Poetry is dangerous, and few poets are more hazardous to complacency than Brett Rutherford. Who would have guessed that poetry — America’s most-avoided art — could come roaring back in a big, wide-ranging book of provocative, understandable, beautiful poems? This book may change how you think about poetry. Praised by Robert Bloch and Ray Bradbury for his dark and supernatural poetry — of which there is a good chunk in this book — this poet is also much more than a master of the macabre. His autumn poems, and other writings centered on nature, astronomy, and the human place in the cosmos, are heir to the grand tradition of such diverse masters as Shelley, Whitman, Hugo and Jeffers. Although the poems are mostly free in form, they are striking in language and Romantic in spirit. Whether writing about Clyde Tombaugh’s discovery of Pluto in 1930, or speaking in the voice of a linden tree in Soviet-invaded Prague, these are poems that tell stories and tell them clearly. And when he turns to the hard, real world, in poems about the World Trade Center disaster, or the ages-old invasion of Korea by Japanese warlords, Rutherford writes as a humanist who sees individuals always able to choose between good and evil. This book, containing poems written or revised between 1991 and 2004 in New York City and in Providence, RI, first appeared in 2005, released simultaneously in print and as a free PDF download. More than 15,000 copies were distributed to a world-wide audience. In this new, second edition, the poet has revised a number of the poems, and split the book into two parts (Prometheus on Fifth Avenue is the second half). Take up this book, take a deep breath, and plunge in.
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