Wild Silence

From the opening pages in which we readers are addressed as Friend and urged let us tie each frayed photon / into a new far-reaching braid. // Light needs such quiet gentle work we are pulled into the embrace of a speaker who will walk with us into a light always dappled by the acknowledgement of waiting mortality who will guide us into close and careful observation. We meet him as a boy when he was shy as a riverbed shadow and kept his prayers / as secret as any shedding faith trading the beliefs of his parents for an abiding reverence for nature. With a steady resistance to those who would only speak / in the language of an answer- / with-no-question we witness the man he has become: adoring husband concerned and loving father messenger of an eco-grief that cries out to even the burrowed rabbit quivering like a fist wishing it one gold day . . . free of tooth and claw. Benjamin Cutler's Wild Silence carries us in its quiet gentle sure-handed grasp bearing us more fully into the world.Jessica Jacobs author of Take Me With You Wherever You're GoingWhile grief / and laughter might begin in the belly in Benjamin Cutler's newest collection Wild Silence these poems never fail to remind us that every mouth is a window / open to the rain. It is at this window that Cutler beautifully renders a world of caring fathers curious sons wooded landscapes indifferent animals and lyrical insightfulness into moments of prayer elegy and gratitude. Even when Cutler's speaker mistakes lamentation for laughter there is keen understanding that life-whether near the Blue Ridge Mountains in a personal garden or at the edge of one season changing into the next-is as full of dying as it is of loving and no one encounter with one's surroundings or others should be taken for granted. The fire might be waning when you reach the end of Cutler's book but like the glowing coal his speaker advises readers to carry with them when they leave you too will carry these poems with you long after you've turned the last page. Esteban Rodríguez author of Ordinary Bodies and Before the Earth Devours UsIf as Simone Weil once wrote absolutely unmixed attention is prayer then the poems of Benjamin Cutler are prayers blessings devotions to the art of being here with others and ourselves. I intend to hear everything Cutler writes and so he guides us into the wild silence to teach us again and again how to listen-to everything to every prayer that salts the air to the hopeless cries in the orange night to the marrow mystery of our own miraculous being. The great promise he writes begins with wild silence. And so with this Wild Silence it does.Joseph Fasano author of The Crossing