She’d Waited Millennia

She’d Waited Millennia, Lizzie Hutton’s debut poetry collection of lyrical free verse, finds its emotional core by navigating through the rises and falls of motherhood. Poems ranging in stanzaic and linear form encompass the breadth of intimacies in relationships: from mother to child, lover to lover, and friend to friend. Each inextricably linked poem gathers strength through an accumulation of immediacy with images that build upon one another; the speaker’s examination of the world reveals a close and complicated relationship with description’s power.

She’d Waited Millennia, Lizzie Hutton’s debut poetry collection of lyrical free verse, finds its emotional core by navigating through the rises and falls of motherhood. Poems ranging in stanzaic and linear form encompass the breadth of intimacies in relationships: from mother to child, lover to lover, and friend to friend. Each inextricably linked poem gathers strength through an accumulation of immediacy with images that build upon one another; the speaker’s examination of the world reveals a close and complicated relationship with description’s power.

A narrative arc runs through one poem as a speaker struggles to conceive a child and then, with child, considers the role of a motherhood and femininity. Once pregnant, the speaker reflects on her childhood memory of attending a wedding in “The Interstate.” In language both intensely lyrical yet translucent, the speaker thinks of how

It reminds me how memory can turn, how my boy
gets rolling sometimes in my middle
like an ocean, with the jointy

movements of a wave curling in
upon itself, a little ear
turned only to its own hum.

While the child begins to change in the movement of the stanza, his movement becoming akin to a wave, the simile remains rooted within the poem. Without growing into the fantastical, these poems about motherhood create reverent moments situated within memory, such as in “Lullaby” where the speaker thinks how this moment “will one day reverb / only in the memory,” and continues to speculate on “The mind’s dark / seasoned soilbed from which, soon, / life too will seem to grow.”

A series of poems interspersed throughout the collection takes up the issue of clear, definitive narrative. In “Fugue,” the speaker takes up the theme of the fugue, claiming

I’d tried to calm
wanting a child. But calm meant nothing
to its smeary

Fact, the body’s
full-leaved tree
that moves itself.

The sudden break of the line to begin a new capitalized stanza (otherwise unused in the rest of the poems, which follow conventional punctuation) demonstrates the associate leaps of the speaker as she juxtaposes image against image, the thought of her own body and the trunk of a tree with its full canopy of leaves. Hutton employs similar moves in “The Lyre,” where the speaker observes her son “Hunkered in crib-dark” and thinks of his sleep “like Hades’ wife / at the plush edge of her sleepy // Rebedding.” The integration of mythology and the sleeping son layer the poem to highlight the succession of images.

In a collection dealing with the emotional intensity of what may appear to be everyday interactions, She’d Waited Millennia reveals the hidden intimacies of these relationships. Concerned with the power of image, the poet constantly revises each lyrical moment in this book, adding a sense of self-awareness and self-guidance through each crafted yet bare poem.