In Memoriam, Robert C. “Beau” Cutts (1947-2013) In the well of the night.— Beau Cutts, “The Etowah,” from Night Is A Rare Place And Other Poems
Beau’s painstaking revisions like Walt fussing over Leaves of Grass. And “The Etowah,” Beau’s master poem at the heart of the book, became the basis for a chapbook of my own, The Etowah River Psalms (http://tinyurl.com/ERP-FHP), making Night Is A Rare Place a book that keeps on giving like its great-hearted author. Someday a PhD candidate will parse Beau’s editorial efforts in her dissertation. I figure collectors will scramble to acquire the complete set of NIARPAOP. I suspect Beau will be anthologized alongside Sidney Lanier. And I believe what was formerly known as the very soul of poet Beau Cutts will one day take up residence in Andromeda, close by, starwise, poetrywise. He’ll loom large o’er the night. ***
A new hole was ripped in the fabric of the planet on September 11: the molecules formerly known as Beau Cutts sailed from Mother Earth into the cosmos and poetry lost a poet’s great heart, an adventurer’s heart, a friend’s heart, a beloved’s heart. While it’d be fair to call Beau a regional poet (Georgia Poet of the Year, 2006), he managed to sidestep the fate of so many such versifiers; you won’t find him in the Galaxy of Obscurity. Sure, he distilled his entire wild life into a single slim volume of poetry, a oneand-only. But what a book it was, it is— as The Centrifugal Eye readers learned when I reviewed his Night Is A Rare Place And Other Poems in these pages in August 2009 (http://tinyurl.com/TCEUnbidden2009). The book went on to become a text assigned in college classrooms, where it was used to teach critical thinking and environmental advocacy. It sold out four times (several hundred copies, I believe), and went into four more editions, each one incorporating
P.S. Because most TCE readers no doubt missed the substantive obituary published in The Atlanta-Journal Constitution, "Writer's joys: adventure and telling of it,” let me quote AJ-C staffer Michelle E. Shaw to give you a deeper appreciation of Beau’s surprising talents: “Beau Cutts was a journalist for 40 years, but he’d been an adventurer all his life. He found a way to somehow meld his job and his hobby, and take complete strangers along for the ride. Cutts snorkeled with humpbacked whales, enjoyed skydiving and hang-gliding excursions and sailed around the world. And after it was all over, he chronicled the experience. ‘He liked to do things that people would maybe dream about doing and then write about them,’ said his former wife, Carol Cutts. ‘He was so able to reach the average reader in the way he presented his stories.’” The same held true for his poems. R.I.P., my Beau-mon.
~Karla Linn Merrifield
The Centrifugal Eye
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