These secrets, my father says,
will never leave this house.
Sealed under every threshold and sash,
we cradle our safety behind curtains
 
rosy with ruffles.  Mother sleeps
on polished sofa cushions in a wash
of urine, ice cubes invisible
under the coffee table...

Here is the story of the child of an alcoholic mother, the victim of paternal incest.  Portraying a doubly tragic existence, her poems are neither pitiable nor lewd.  They trace an astounding survival.

No matter what I remember, I know
I'd ride my bicycle to a vacant house,
lingering afternoons in that tranquil Georgian
with impossible angles and square rooms,
a caretaker, I thought, while waiting for something
to happen.  I imagined everything.

And yet, inevitably, horror seeps into wisps of dark behind her poems:

Tall lilacs teased the ledge
with compact buds, so thick with fragrance
I couldn't see the ruin of sharp twigs

While the poet has not shied away from the complex details of dysfunction, it is not as you might imagine, a standard tale of one damaged and living in the ashes of existence.  Sutton's vivid, individual moments jumble with the common objects of life--vacation, mother's filigree compact, father's rolled socks, the stuttering fluorescent light in the bathroom, the roses blooming in the side yard.  Sutton writes of objects that seem to have the bare honesty of photographs, but the objects have been stained with unspeakable secrets. 

It could be any summer evening.
Mesh screens in upstairs windows
bulge with the day's last heat,
lean toward roses in the side yard.

We read of life's familiar places and episodes--motorcycle boyfriend, clothes shopping, barbecue, peonies, ballet lessons (those careful dances...all design, glaze,/ random dazzle--the only hope we knew), home permanents.  Here are pieces of time inside of which she pushes to build an innocence she never owned.

On the back of a motorcycle, I leaned
into every highway curve.  My body melted,
almost slipping face-first to gritty pavement
while holding him in my rapt arms.  I argued
against the wind that rolled me toward asphalt,
 
but the air kissed me down, gluing my belly
to his polished back.  You have to learn to bend.

Does she believe as a child that the only reality is her own, and that everyone's life is like that, or does she believe that hers is the only private hell in a development filled with utopian lives within picket fences that close her out?  She believes both.  I long to fill this review with every wonderful poem, to show you Sutton's unflawed skill.  But you will have to read Embellishments for yourself.  Nor will you escape from this book unchanged.              --  Peggy Miller 10/05

Reviewed by Peggy Miller, Associate Editor, The Comstock Review, May 2005