September Sarabande - Book Listing

BRETT RUTHERFORD'S

SEPTEMBER SARABANDE
(NEW POEMS AND WRITINGS 2022).

A tour-de-force of literary creation, September Sarabande presents all the poems and fiction created by neo-Romantic American poet Brett Rutherford in the twelve months of 2022. Along with the usual bizarre and Gothic creations of this Pittsburgh-based poet, the 209 poems also trace in biting satire the year of COVID, the Giant Insane Baby Ex-President, and looming mass extinctions. Placed here in the order written, the poems span settings as diverse as rural Pennsylvania, Revolutionary Russia, Tang Dynasty China, and New York City. The speaking voice can be The Emperor of China, a centipede living beneath a carpet, a solitary oak leaf in Crimea, or a librarian in ancient Alexandria. Three poem-cycles adapt and expand the writings of poets whose works are seldom seen in English: the witty Eros-obsessed Greeks Callimachus and Meleager, and Li Yu, the exiled and doomed last Emperor of Southern Tang, whose poems are counted as the saddest things ever written in the Chinese language. Rutherford enfolds the originals into narrative cycles that portray each classic poet in his times, yet makes each work speak with new meaning for our times.

This volume also includes four supernatural sketches about a First World War succubus, Edgar Poe's encounter with a graveyard specter, a childhood encounter with the legendary Jewish Golem, and the confessions of Dr. Frankenstein’s hunchback assistant. These compressed narratives are akin to European supernatural sketches like those of Ludwig Tieck from the Romantic era.

Finally, more than 180 Facebook diary entries trace the poet’s everyday life and writing, with ideas and rants shared online with his friends. As a journal of living through a time of epidemic and dreadful politics, this casts light on some of the poems and what prompted them. Rutherford’s engagement with film, classic literature, classical music, poetry publishing, and his Pittsburgh environs, all shine through.

This is the 315th publication of The Poet’s Press. Published April 2024. Paperback, 490 pages, 6 by 9 inches. ISBN 9798321267684. $21.95. CLICK HERE TO ORDER FROM AMAZON.

From Hecla to Jacob's Creek

 

BRETT RUTHERFORD’S
FROM HECLA TO JACOB’S CREEK

American neo-Romantic poet Brett Rutherford spent his first thirteen years in the coal and coke districts of southwestern Pennsylvania. The Rutherfords had emigrated from Northumberland in England to Scottdale around 1880, and took part in its mill-town boom as business owners, financiers, and shop owners. After the Depression destroyed the town’s fortunes, the family remained, a pinch-penny aristocracy. The other side of his family dwells “out home,” where Alsatian maternal grandparents lived in squalor in a tar-paper-covered shack. These country people, their pride and their secrets, left an indelible impression that emerges in this book.

In addition to coke ovens, coal mines, and decrepit houses, the poet’s early childhood is also blasted by the specter of “Dr. Jones,” who, his mother assures him, can be summoned with a phone call, to employ his amputation saws on the limbs of any disobedient child. Connected to this is the threat of “Torrance,” the state mental hospital where several aunts and uncles had been sent, where ordinary mental patients were confined with the criminally insane. The two poems recovering memories of this psychological horror are a jarring specimen of childhood trauma.

This is a book of secrets. A grandmother reveals her Native American origins. An imaginary playmate turns out to be real. A pact is made to help a visiting Rabbi make a Golem. Small boys wrestle with the discovery of a sex manual. A neighbor woman freezes to death in a cold wave. A hesitant girl on the library steps never manages to cross its threshold. After a divorce scandal, the town pulls a blanket of silence and shunning, and a family name is erased from history.

This memoir in poems portrays a true “outsider,” already reading adult literature from the age of six, finding his own way out of a brutal and forbidding landscape.

This is the 316th publication of The Poet’s Press. Published July 2024. Epub and Kindle $1.99. Order from Amazon at https://amzn.to/3WoHuVA.