The Curator of Silence

In The Curator of Silence, Jude Nutter increasingly explores mortality throughout the book. Many of the poems use death as an underlying theme or use allusions to mortality in the titles. The poem “The Rest of Us” contests the existence of heaven and what follows after: “There is no heaven; / only birds and wind. Your mind / flirting with its own absence” (17). This declaration contrasts with the images in the stanza before it, where the speaker cannot help but think about “Blake, who saw angels / bleating with fire in the trees,” which indicates that perhaps mortality is experiential (17). The last stanza in the poem makes the concession that there are two worlds, one with angels and one “where the rest of us live, where there are no angels” (18).

Death is personified in “Crow,” described as “everyone’s lover; the ultimate / philanderer,” who will “follow each of us like a voyeur after dark in a small town” (54). Death disguises itself so that the unwitting will turn to it seeking solace, its voice “spliced through [the] mother’s whispers” (54). The following stanza incorporates the motifs of emptiness and absence echoed in other poems. In “Crows,” birds “stand fussing / in a circle around their dead companion” and stare after his body long after it disappears out to sea (67). The last line ties together threads that have been carried throughout the book concerning the world of the speaker (and the book) and the imagined world. The speaker’s world, the world we presumably live in, is at times, “just enough like paradise” (67). In the world of the poem, death begets emptiness and absence, an end, but the beauty of the moment makes the world tolerable, enough like the world with a heaven and an afterlife that the speaker finds comfort.

Nutter uses multiple references to Biblical tales and a few allusions to Greek myths. Adam and Eve, and original sin, are hinted at in “Grave Robbing with Rilke”: “Any fall toward knowledge is won / through disobedience to the gods” (7). Eden is mentioned as an alternate place, “our most elaborate dream” in “Horses,” likening it to that other world of angels and afterlife (21). “Look” and “The Last Supper” deal directly with the characters of God, Mary, and Gabriel, at times despoiling their religious reputations and infallibility: “Even God is a victim of vanity” and “here’s Gabriel / in the side chapel in his oversized cloak—no glimmer / of spandex anywhere and it’s a miracle” (28). The Greek chimera, an animal composed of multiple animals, is used in a metaphor in the title poem. Crows are also featured in both Greek and European mythology. In Greek myth, Crows are associated with rumors and telling secrets (Coronis turned the raven from white to black when it told Apollo about his love affair). More famously, crows are recognized as the harbingers of death in European mythology (because of their color and circling of dead bodies), which is the reputation I believe Nutter is playing on in “Crow” and “Crows.”