Description
Small Feather
by Jade Rosina McCutcheon
$14.99 paper
978-1-64662-290-0
2020
Australian born Jade Rosina McCutcheon holds a Doctor of Creative Arts from the University of Technology, Sydney and a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Melbourne. She graduated from N.I.D.A. Sydney as a theatre director and has worked as a professional director in Australia and the United States as well as in many Universities. Her publications include books, Awakening the Performing Body, Embodied Consciousness Performance Technologies, Narrative in Performance, chapters in edited, peer reviewed volumes and poetry in Australian magazines. She was awarded second place in the Kay Snow Poetry Prize (Oregon) this year for her poem ‘Fair Art’. “Small Feather” is her first poetry chapbook. She also had three poems published in Terra Incognita (Bob Hill publishing 2019). Jade lives in Salem ,Oregon with her partner and their Australian Labradoodle.
John Van Dreal –
Jade Rosina McCutcheon is still here
By John Van Dreal
The cover of the chapbook immediately caught my eye. Within a kaleidoscope of doodled line and color, a thought bubble speaking for the soul of the work declares, “I AM Still here.” Within a few hours, I was at the book’s end, where the last poem, “Into Green,” sings: “into the stream, out of a dream / she answered: ‘here I am’.”
SMALL FEATHER begins with a joyous birth of energy in “Australian Bush Solstice” as Jade Rosina McCutcheon introduces the grandeur of an evening in her homeland: “Our revelry bounces off full moon light / flashes between stampeding clouds / as a summer storm excites the air / crackling the blue-green gums.” From there, the poet ambles through splendidly descriptive words, doodle drawings, and atmospheric black-and-white photos, to the last page, where she concludes: “A journey ended, yet begun / a spider’s web is still being spun / around, within, the frog still sings / inside the forest green, there spins ……. / a dream.”
Surrounded by the textures, smells, and tastes of the Governor’s Cup coffee house, McCutcheon and I chatted about her life and work. Her accent and diction are delightful distractions, making almost everything she says both lyrical and engaging. She sees herself as just one person—“a small feather in a collective”—but also a witness, awake and observing. McCutcheon is academically accomplished, with two doctoral degrees and books on performance and consciousness. SMALL FEATHER is her first chapbook of poetry.
A resident of Australia until she relocated to the U.S. 20 years ago, she spends her days moongazing, writing, drawing, playing music, and engaging in numerous constructive activities, including social work, feminist studies, and supporting survivors of abuse.
Her work is deeply fused to her connections with people, the land, and the cosmos. The Australian terrain and its people spoke to her, spiritually and aesthetically, but when she moved to the States, she lost touch with those sources of inspiration. It took journeys to California’s Mt. Shasta and the Dorland Mountain Arts Community, Salem’s Minto Brown Island Park, and the Oregon coast, combined with her volunteer crisis work, to find the audible frequency of the American experience that now inspires her craft.
In her poem “Turquoise,” she writes:
Sun deep carmine
falls into dusty
orange light
sweet cumin
smells dance
spilling upon
all the life
in that house
coming together
deep inside
the violet scented
turquoise
heart.
I may or may not have mentioned to her that those words might be fun to experience with a microdose of psilocybin, but she certainly did tell me her intention in writing the passage was to create something “fabulously imaginative and descriptive.”
Her poems range from surreal and dreamy to the metaphysical, then to intensely insightful and boldly, but beautifully, tragic. In “After,” she writes of finding a dead sparrow:
I am weeping outside,
under the stars
as though
the bird
were you
small feather
on the hardwood
floor
a sudden gust
and you’re
gone.
McCutcheon may see herself as a small feather, but her poetic voice is a grand plumage.
John Van Dreal is a member of the Mid-Valley Poetry Society, which furnishes this monthly column on Oregon poets and their works. He can be reached at johnvandreal@gmail.com.