"A famous poet once observed that it is difficult to get the news from poems. The weather is a different story. April showers, summer sunshine and maybe especially the chill of winter provide an endless supply of moods and metaphors. Poets like to practice a double meteorology, looking out at the water and up at the sky for evidence of interior conditions of feeling. The inner and outer forecasts don't always match up."
"At first, the emotional temperature seems as frosty as the place Gluck describes, a river town about 40 miles north of New York City. The sun provides a flicker of fire, but not much heat. The first six lines are hard and cold, skinny as icicles, bent into the wind. The rhymes and near-rhymes huddle together, shivering. The only scrap of comfort is hidden in a chilly simile: This is not the kind of fur that will keep any creature warm."
A cold, spare winter landscape appears: spiked sun, blown gravel, bone fastened like fur to a river, and stripped pines above dead valves. Sparse human presence is suggested by a recalled blown tire while delivering Christmas presents last year. The language emphasizes hard, skinny images and clustered rhymes that create a stinging, wintry sound. A central standstill produces precise rhythmic balance. After prolonged frost and stasis, the scene suddenly shifts into intense heat and flame, converting accumulated austerity into a surprising emotional eruption.
Read at www.nytimes.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]