Pictures of the Afterlife

By: Jude Nutter

€10.00

"Jude Nutter's early work is measured and precise, elegiac in its sorrow and love for the natural world. It was no surprise when I found she had homesteaded on Wrangell Island in Alaska for ten years, working the land, watching birds, listening to snow, and writing poems. That quality of solitude, patience and a survivalist's strict attention to detail comes through in her work. Nutter's first collection, Pictures of the Aft...

ISBN	1-903392-26-8
Pub Date	Friday, November 01, 2002
Cover Image	Louis Schiavonetti
Page Count	68
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"Jude Nutter's early work is measured and precise, elegiac in its sorrow and love for the natural world. It was no surprise when I found she had homesteaded on Wrangell Island in Alaska for ten years, working the land, watching birds, listening to snow, and writing poems. That quality of solitude, patience and a survivalist's strict attention to detail comes through in her work. Nutter's first collection, Pictures of the Afterlife, explores not only the possibility of the spirit's existence after the death of the body, it also includes poems that look at how we navigate the earthly life after loss, trauma, or any event that realigns our consciousness. To paraphrase Adam Philips, these poems are concerned with what can be done with what is left. And her poetry has continued to expand to include her growing passions and concerns - the power and fragility of the body, the intricacies of the mind, and the capacity of the living heart to heal itself. These are intelligent, mature, hardworking poems that are blessed with clarity and complexity, designed to deepen your experience of this world, and prepare you, with tenderness, for what comes next."

Dorianne Laux, Associate Professor of Creative Writing, University of Oregon, Eugene

Jude Nutter

Jude Nutter was born in North Yorkshire, England, and grew up near Hannover, in northern Germany. She studied printmaking at Winchester School of Art (UK) and received her MFA in poetry from the University of Oregon. Her poems have appeared in numerous national and international journals and have received over forty awards and grants, including two McKnight Fellowships, The Moth International Poetry Prize, The Larry Levis Prize, The William Matthews Prize, The Joy Harjo Poetry Award, and grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation and the National Science Foundation’s Writers and Artists Program in Antarctica. Her first book-length collection, Pictures of the Afterlife (Salmon Poetry), winner of the Irish Listowel Prize, was published in 2002. The Curator of Silence (University of Notre Dame Press), her second collection, won the Ernest Sandeen Prize and was awarded the 2007 Minnesota Book Award in poetry. A third collection, I Wish I Had a Heart Like Yours, Walt Whitman (University of Notre Dame Press), was awarded the 2010 Minnesota Book Award in poetry and voted Poetry Book of the Year by Foreword Review, New York. She currently teaches in Minneapolis and divides her time between Minnesota and Dingle, Ireland, where she has a family home.

Bodies

The foxgloves begin that flickering
descentaway from themselves, out
of the visible world: all summer
the narrow sheaths of their flowers
unfurl and the bees, drawn always
by the suck of quiet blooming, arrive
at each slow secret as it rides there
on the thin flame of its stem. And every

flower is bruised hollow with light
and for a while they ignite like the naves
of churches. No wonder the bees
keep nudging beyond the smooth clutch

of the petals and into the widening emptiness
inside those flowers, on fire
with the only burning that counts.

Other Titles from Jude Nutter

Dead Reckoning

€12.00

Pictures of the Afterlife / Jude Nutter