The White Hart - Michael Sutton

The White Hart

‘Michael Sutton brings his appropriately restless poetics to this weirdly typical meeting of the mythic, mundane and devastating. A poet whose work is unpredictable, diverse and alert to a tender pain scries these blunt occultations of now ‘like nested earths’ and is put to work – a working of poetics characterised by digging and restraint: ‘mulch’ and the ‘untouchable’. And into this tense exchange, Sutton’s collagic sleight of hand brings a turning logic that grows beyond our scraps of documentation and history to articulate a greater circle. Recorded in/as temporal flux, diary, daydream and the deepening realisation between burial and ascent, The White Hart turns modest corners of observation into a form of eerie divination. Transformation is nearing as it recedes, moving through grief and hope to wonder if ‘soon someone will come to dig us out.’

 

David Spittle

‘

Michael Sutton’s The White Hart is a parable for these times, a folk lyric fused with the symbolism of the Elizabethans and the condensed cadences of William Carlos Williams. These are poems that hit with the force of legend eclipsing truth. Sutton, with one ear tuned to the modernist line, and the other to urban legends, misses nothing. In his poetic imaginary, the shooting of a white hart is not just another trophy for late capitalism. He’s taking witness from the streets: the last poet to refuse leaving the arena without first touching the flowers.’

 

Chris McCabe