Water’s Leaves and Other Poems

By Geoffrey Nutter

• Description
• Reviews
• Bio

• “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 “instress”) that feels like Geoffrey Nutter, a private Oz. I liked visiting it.
  Joshua Corey, Cahiers de Corey
  
  Nutter sees things the rest of us do not. . . . Water’s Leaves has the effect of entering a gallery filled with landscape paintings one has never seen. . . . too beautiful to be missed. Wade into the book slowly, ankle-deep, as in Nutter’s words, “great ones wade into the Mississippi.”
  Michelle Taransky, Time Out Chicago
  
  So I like Geoffrey Nutter, but not because he’s a philosophical poet, or because he falls squarely in the tradition of poets who could, say, make George Santayana palatable. He poses the question of “what is half-seen and half-created” in the mind of the interpreter at least as well as anyone who’s work I’ve read lately.
  Greg Purcell, The Entertainment Industry (No Slander)
  
  

• Geoffrey Nutter is the author of A Summer Evening (winner of the 2001 Colorado Prize), Water’s Leaves & Other Poems (Winner of the 2004 Verse Press Prize), Christopher Sunset (winner of the 2011 Sheila Motton Book Award), The Rose of January (Wave Books, 2013), and Cities at Dawn (Wave Books, 2016), and Giant Moth Perishes (Wave Books, 2021). He recently traveled in China, giving lectures, workshops, and readings as a participant in the Sun Yat-sen University Writers’ Residency. Geoffrey’s poems have been translated into Spanish, French, and Mandarin. Soir d’été, a bilingual edition of his poems translated into French by poets Molly Lou Freeman and Julien Marcland, was recently published in France, and a German translation of his book Water’s Leaves & Other Poems will appear in 2021. He has taught poetry at Princeton, Columbia, University of Iowa, NYU, the New School, and 92nd Street Y. He currently teaches Greek and Latin Classics at Queens College. He runs the Wallson Glass Poetry Seminars in New York City.