Will Schutt’s debut, Westerly, is a young man’s book, full of pizzazz, and panache, and a lot of transfat.1 The thing about young poets’ books, the best of them, is how fearless they seem—they take in a lot of territory, and chew a lot of scenery, and ask for more.
Two doors down lived a descendent of de Sade.
He rode a vintage Trek in a gingham shirt.
A blue Hamsa strung around his neck
waved when he waved. The name meant
nearly nil to us, cluelessly humming the catalog
of history in “We Didn’t Start the Fire”—
Harry Truman, Ho Chi Minh, Rockefeller, Roy Cohn.
Hunting arrowheads, we made off with a haul
of tangled wires, nickeled tubs. Some inheritance.
Children of thalidomide, hypodermics on the shore.
The references go every which way at once, from the Marquis to a popular bike to a Middle Eastern amulet to a fading Boomer pop star. (It’s a wall of words reminiscent of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound—that is, partly a horror vacui.) Billy Joel’s potted post-war history was itself a blizzard of 120 references, and Boomers should recognize every one. Schutt was born decades too late: The search for history is the search for a once familiar world now mysterious. The children chant names and phrases that have no meaning for them—such ignorance is the beginning of poetry.
If that were all, Schutt would be no better
