Excerpt from Review of Natural Instincts and A Change of Pace by Boston Literary Magazine (11/09)
It's not just that I can smell the salty ocean air and hear the gentle waves whooosh...shooooo on the shore when I read Emily Scudder's poetry... it's that I find myself transported to a place of closely-examined ennui, dissatisfaction, and desperation for just one hour alone - you know, the mental activities we all engage in but don't have the guts to 'fess up to? Scudder's writing is so honest, so relatable, so likable, dammit! I just want to hang out with her! But at the same time, this is a masterful poet who loves her husband and children, and who possesses an enviable, nearly Zen-like connection with Nature... a woman who appreciates the small, sacred moments of each day:
If you leave a soda can on the lawn
bees begin to hover. They know to come.
Ants lift a blue chip.
A hamster eats her gummy stillborn, more
protein than progeny now.
Like the tree knows when to fork itself.
Nature rivets. Screws me into dramas
in the kitchen, past the yard.
Behind the house a black snake tried
to swallow a brown frog. It gave up.
Slithered to the brush.
Gleaming in snake spit, the huge frog
sat, stunned in the sun.
10 whales washed up.
8 bottle-nosed dolphins too.
Volunteers came quickly. They found
some alive & picked at. The gulls did it.
On stretchers, the dolphins clicked & clicked.
~ "Natural Instincts"
In Emily Scudder's poems, "nature rivets," and so does solitude: a room of her own would be by the sea, perhaps in the
sea for closer observation of the marine life filling this chapbook.
Here's a fresh humorous voice often plagued by humid domesticities far
away from that room, but delighted by the demands made. Throughout
Natural Instincts, her wry observing eye is always scanning the horizon
for pleasure too. This is a skilled poetic voice honestly assessing and
caressing material at the same time.
--Suzanne E. Berger, teaches at Lesley University, and is the author of Legacies, These Rooms, and Horizontal Woman
“Nature rivets,” the poet
wryly observes in the poem “Natural Instincts.” The poems in this
excellent chapbook also rivet, giving us deep glimpses into the life of
the mind and body, both wild and domesticated. Emily Scudder’s poems
are wonderfully crafted, dynamic, reverberant.
- Frannie Lindsay, author of Lamb and Where She Always Was.
Emily Scudder is a poet to watch. Her poems make you sit up and listen and what you hear are your own thoughts coming back toyou. These fine new poems will surprise you with their erotic beauty, like someone placing a hot hand on your bare back.
-- June Beisch, author of Fatherless Woman and Take Notes.
