The Matushka Case

The poems in The Matuschka Case represent the core of Fraser Sutherland's poetic preoccupations over several decades. They are enquiries into the nature of happiness, absent or present, deserved or undeserved. For Sutherland, happiness consists in the practice of art, and in often bafled attempts to understand the other. Rueful and sardonic, uncomfortable in his own white skin, he seeks the other in everything that is foreign and unfamiliar. In his ideal world, he would "drift...
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The poems in The Matuschka Case represent the core of Fraser Sutherland's poetic preoccupations over several decades. They are enquiries into the nature of happiness, absent or present, deserved or undeserved. For Sutherland, happiness consists in the practice of art, and in often bafled attempts to understand the other. Rueful and sardonic, uncomfortable in his own white skin, he seeks the other in everything that is foreign and unfamiliar. In his ideal world, he would "drift into a bar / secretive and self-contained, my whole past / packed inside me like a bomb."