Visions for Winter

Categories: Poetry

Winter...sheer and utter cold, thoughts rising sluggishly like sap through the veins of a maple.  What a great time to read a poem and let the images in it dance over the surface of your nearly hibernating brain! John Ashbery is a favorite of mine for cold days like these.  His strange peekaboo glimpses of image after image make even familiar items and ideas seem strange and new.  Beyond that, I've got a special kind of respect for a poet who can write a sestina about Popeye.

On the new books shelf recently, I noticed an Ashbery collection I'd not yet seen.  Notes from the Air is a selection of poems from the last 20 years of Ashbery's work, mostly written during his middle-age and beyond.  Perhaps that's part of what makes this collection so suitable for my winter days.  Like all Ashbery poems there's a certain surreal confusion to the style, however, when one lets the images flow past, there's a sense of longing, disconnection and regret in many of the poems that speaks to the season.