Water’s Leaves and Other Poems

By Geoffrey Nutter Description Reviews “How much of what we call ‘seeing’ is actually ‘believing’?” Geoffrey Nutter asks in his dazzling second collection. The quiet yet daring “water voices” of these poems carry the reader into their serious play, in settings as varied as the Tappan Zee Bridge and the inside of a flower, turning language joyfully “touchable” and words into music. Winner of the 2004 Verse Prize, selected by the Verse Press Editorial Board It seems to me that the true love child of Stevens and Stein in our time has to be John Ashbery, and often reading this book I got the same pleasure of tickled synapses that I get from Ashbery’s whimsical, death-haunted late work. But if Nutter’s an Ashberian he's at least very good at it, and I get the sense of a genuine wonder—at the world and at the mysterious sources of inspiration—struggling through the chinks of his ornate verbal surfaces. There’s a there there, in other words, an imaginative landscape (the “instre