Review by Michelle Panik
In Shutta Crum’s latest chapbook, The Way to the River, readers embark on an exploration of struggle and suffering, beauty and triumph, which asks them to consider how a journey can shape a person, and how a person can shape their journeys. The chapbook is organized into seven sections—each one a different leg of a journey. As someone who’s in the middle of planning my family’s summer vacation, I eagerly dove in—if not for travel tips, then to at least feed off the electric, kinetic energy of travel.
The first section, “Why Poetry,” is a meditation on the form, and the next section, “Of Maps and Their Roads,” focuses on a road trip’s beginning. In “How to Properly Read a Map,” the speaker implores readers to
put away your electronics.
Find a map your father used on road trips—
the one that billowed in the front seat
Mom’s finger racing across it. (20)
With the setup complete, the speaker instructs the reader to make their homebound selves comfortable with a glass of milk, pajamas and socks, and a cookie; their close inspection of a map itself will become their first journey.
In the third section, “Someone to Ride Shotgun,” readers back out of the driveway and begin their trip. These poems focus on relationships with one other person—from a past lover to a current husband, from a hitchhiker to the work of poet Joseph Brodsky. The 2020 Pushcart-nominated poem, “We Meet for Coffee at a Crowded Café,” depicts a single scene in which one woman helps another escape an abusive relationship.
After zeroing in on specific relationships, the “Wading Out” section stretches into oblique poems that prioritize emotions over concrete situations. All of these trips include water—rivers, creeks, beaches, strands, and even the water-carved valley of Moab. In “Moab,” a speaker says:
I kneel, and blow the dust away
from the boulder we’ve pulled
ourselves upon.
My fingers find traceries—
The ancient signatures of water. (40)
While this simple imagery is clear, I wished to know more about the speaker and whom they’re addressing in the hope that backstory might help me better understand the moment’s significance.
But where this poem is slightly lean, there’s much to admire in the book’s fifth section, “Water in the Lungs.” With a title so evocative of high-stakes struggle, I was most interested to read its poems, and they didn’t disappoint. The most successful, for me, was “After You,” in which an unhealthy relationship is seen through the destruction of a forest. In this extended metaphor, the speaker travels through a forest encountering clues of another person’s presence by glimpsing the abuse they wrought on it (“the pine you slashed,” “the scar/your shoe made in the mud,” “the bent limb/another sign of your trespass.”) (49) This is a raw narrator who sees violence and, not shying away, treks on to discover what’s happened—to this natural place and to them. Although there is no resolution, the poem closes with the speaker refusing to retreat by declaring:
Yes—I’m here, again
trailing you through the scrublands
bandaging the wounded
wondering what door you jimmied
to escape and machete through my memory (49)
After one more section, “Where the Dark Wild Closes in,” the book finishes with “Everything is Far.” Weary readers might at this point expect a gradual descent home, but Crum veers down a side road for a rumination on mortality with poems that feature a canoeist floating down their life’s stream, a child accepting their mother’s death, and a speaker recognizing their own impermanence. While not an easy denouement, this homecoming nonetheless feels like the natural endpoint for a collection of poems that takes readers to the precipice of what it means to adventure through life
Shutta Crum is an award-winning poet and children’s book writer, as well as an oft-requested speaker and presenter at writing conferences, libraries, and schools. Shutta’s poems have appeared in many journals since the 1970s, including AAR2, Blue Mountain Review, Typehouse, 3rd Wednesday, Southern Poetry Review, Better Than Starbucks, Main Street Rag, Plainsongs, and many more. Her chapbook, When You Get Here, won a gold Royal Palm Literary Award. Learn more about her at https://shutta.com.
The Way to the River by Shutta Crum
Kelsay Books, 2022, $16.50, paper
9781639800889
Michelle Panik is a writer and substitute school teacher who lives on the edge of California, in Carlsbad, with her husband and their two kids.