Anna Crowe
Deconstructing Winter
Every year you learn it the hard way:
a semiotics of cold that wind dins
into you until you have it by heart -
its ear-ache drone, its keyhole whine.
Frost you have at your fingertips.
Its rules are simple: a black frost means
weak birds invariably decline; whereas
hoar-frost favours the fairy-tale, rewards
humility with godmotherly largesse.
Take the back-garden, where dazzling marginalia
may suddenly appear on leaves, defy translation;
and the shed-window - all year a transparent Cinderella -
may suddenly publish a densely-worded work on rare ferns.
Meaning’s encoded, too deep to dig for -
form coiled as tight as an ammonite,
the garden wall a library
on the hermeneutics of the snail.
Acknowledging a debt to Sterne, snow
offers the reader days of blank pages.
A shiver of robin-song, and it’s March -
still Janus-days when you stare into haar’s drift
in search of a but or an and.
But it’s when the blackbird sings in the viburnum
that you twig: icicles melting in that pink-pink-pink.
Page(s) 20
magazine list
- Features
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- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The