The Goodman's Croft, or, The Devil's Garden Patch

A triumph of literature in the age of tiny-minded tyrants, The Goodman's Croft presents all the 131 poems created by neo-Romantic American poet Brett Rutherford in the twelve months of 2023. Poets are citizens of all places and all times, and this collection spans continents and millennia. Political gloom and biting satire regarding the present are inevitable, but the far-ranging poems here are also a visionary grand tour of Elysium, Northumbrian weddings, British oak trees, Ice-Age ancestors, garden plots devoted to Satan, and an ode to the bologna sandwich. Sixteen poems adapted from the ancient Greek Meleager set the stage for "The Argo Got Away," a set of 56 lyric poems based on the famous Greek Anthology. The sunny, open-hearted world of the Greeks seems light-years away from our own repressed time, as these love poems, elegies, animal stories, and mythic episodes burst into new life in new language.

In another grouping, "The Azaleas of Ningpo," Rutherford transports the reader to ancient China, whose art and porcelain become taking-off points for rapturous narratives, especially "Kangxi Drinks Tea from His Porcelain Eggshell Teacups," a traversal of classic Chinese flower lore seen through the eyes of a powerful emperor.

The final section of this book is a sampler from the poet's most ambitious project, the first full English version of Victor Hugo's devastating epic poem cycle, The Terrible Year, mixed with some original poems in the same troubled political mood. The Hugo poems presented here are from the autumn and winter of 1870-1871, when Paris was besieged by the Prussian army and subjected to starvation.

Finally, more than 90 Facebook diary entries trace the poet's everyday life and writing, with ideas and rants shared online with friends. As a journal of living through a time of threatening politics, this casts light on some of the poems and what prompted them. Rutherford's engagement with film, classic literature, classical music, poetry publishing, and his Pittsburgh environs, all shine through.

... More