Snow somehow still feels magical to me, despite wading through decades of it in the Midwest, then on the East Coast. Maybe it’s because I grew up in California, where it did snow, though less frequently than here in New England. The rarity made it remarkable: I remember one birthday of mine, around five or six years old, waking up to the present of snow. It was late December and just cold enough for the talc-light powder to stick to the road. The neighbor and I found fire-engine red snow dishes made of thin plastic and coasted down his steep asphalt driveway, glissading and giggling the whole way down. Maybe you have similar memories, piled high with fallen snow? No wonder poets so frequently wonder at winter marvels.
Some of us might be familiar with the exquisite, but well-trodden paths of traditional poetic winters. I think of Robert Frost’s “Dust of Snow” and the mischievous, yet delightful ways that nature can surprise, even when it appears empty and stark. There are other renowned poets (Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, etc.) who treat the season, some finding joy and hope; others despair and intimations of mortality in the waning light. But I wanted to survey more contemporary poets to gather a kind of winter garden. Maybe it’s more like a museum of modern snowfall. If each snowflake is unique—as is often said—then each event of snowfall is one of a kind. Each poem a kind of snowfall. I offer you five poems on winter to consider:
“Love” by Alex Dimitrov – Dimitrov’s litany of love includes the lines: I love snow and briefly. / I love the first minutes in a warm room after stepping out of the cold. The entire poem is a delight, but I especially appreciate the contrasting notions of brevity delivered by the speaker, of “briefly” loving the snow (which can also be read a second way as: “I love snow [and I love briefly],” hinting at the short time on earth we are given to love. This is followed up by another description of the fleeting comfort of those “first minutes in a warm room.” How relatable, these brief, but deeply felt moments of hot and cold, of joy in the snow and then warmth by the fire.
“Winter Recipes from the Collective” by Louise Glück – always a keen observer of time and mortality, Glück’s winter in this poem is a cold embrace, both comforting and indifferent to our human affairs. The rhythm of life continues among and against winter’s freeze: Shadows passing over snow,/ steps approaching and going away. Traces of life left in memory. However, the speaker still finds solace in duties of care, in the present, in making sandwiches, in living collectively, even and especially in the cold.
“Pear Snow” by Todd Dillard – in this exquisite and playful poem, the speaker imagines himself in a speculative setting where the dead have awakened and are surprisingly chatty. He has been employed as a chauffeur to ferry the deceased back to their graves, and along the journey, recounts how:
the dead ask me to take them home,
and on the drive I recite this line I’m working on
about the graininess of two-day-old snow.
“Pear snow,” I call it.
The dead say nothing
For me, these lines distill and describe a relationship with loss; how we all carry our dead in our minds and our hearts. Aren’t they often inquisitive, concerned, stern, confused? And, like the poet-speaker in the poem, they don’t offer much in the way of response when we try to engage. Still we do the work of care for them, chauffeur them around in our heads; do the labor to dig out their places of rest. All our imagination and future hopes might appear to them like “pear snow,” an invention of language, an image fallen and frozen. (I encourage you to listen to the poet read the work at the link above)
“Little Winter” by Carl Phillips – Phillips is a poet of interiority, of its seasons and landscapes. His speaker dives inward, to the life of the mind, trying to parse the Little fever-snow of/ days when, just as certain colors, even now, can suggest a time/ that you called innocent, more honest… I love Phillips because it feels that he writes exactly how he thinks, with all the mind’s twisting paths, reversals and mixed metaphors (what would a “fever-snow” entail?). His speaker wanders through the snow to find himself, and as a reader I am always surprised by his insights, amazed, given the chills.
“Grace” by Joy Harjo – in this powerful prose poem by former three-term National Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo, winter serves as the stark backdrop for memories both personal and cultural of desolation. Stored up like vast snowbanks and spiked with the haunting voices of the starved and mutilated broke fences, the land cracks and fissures into pieces with jagged borders. Yet, the speaker finds grace and it comes in the form of balance, of listening to the land and its people’s traditions; Harjo is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. It is a balanced grace, the opposite of fracture, that holds the promise that snow will melt, and underneath it new growth from will emerge from the ancient land along with spring.
I hope these poems gave you words to swaddle yourself with this winter. A warm room inside yourself as refuge from the cold.
