1. 'Snow' by Louis Macneice
An obvious choice, I know, but the snow poem all other snow poems now have to nod in the direction of.
2. 'History' by Paul Muldoon
Okay, getting off topic already - but this surely has to be the best response to Mcneice?
3. 'Snow' by David Briggs
A poem about words for snow, and how the wonder is as much in the words as in the snow.
4. 'Snow-Flakes' by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Snow as 'the poem of the air'.
5. 'Snow Melting' by Gjertrud Schnackenberg
Snow melts to reveal a world without love.
6. 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening' by Robert Frost
One of the best-known poems by any American poet. And the Fozzie Bear rendition is pretty good, too.
7. 'The Buck in the Snow' by Edna St. Vincent Millay
An uncanny, almost symbolist poem - frustrated desire and failed communication.
8. 'Slush' by Alan Buckley
A poem about the loss of growing up that also tackles the theme of climate change in a subtle and personal way.
9. 'Snow Water' by Michael Longley
Imagine drinking the purity of snow.
10. 'Snow and Snow' by Ted Hughes
The sensuality of snow in Hughes' transformative imagination.
I'm sure other people have their favourites - maybe some I don't know. Why note share them with a comment on the blog?
Lovely stuff David, thank you. I like 'Spring Snow' by Willam Matthews.
ReplyDeleteYou can find it on the Poetry Foundation website. Also 'the snow is melting' by Kobayashi Issa
which I can quote in full as it is a haiku.
The snow is melting
and the village is flooded
with children.
Thanks for those, Roy! I don't know Mathews' work, but I enjoyed his exploration of snow and memory. It really is a childhood kind of weather.
ReplyDeleteThanks. I know and love several of those on your list.
ReplyDeleteGlad you enjoyed them, Bernie!
DeleteGot to be Frost forvme, enigmatic....snow creates such purity and mystery
ReplyDelete.
It is very memorable, Kate - and I wouldn't be the first person to point out the irony of Mr Frost being best known for a snowy poem.
DeleteSigns on a White Field by Robin Robertson
ReplyDeleteThe sun’s hinge on the burnt horizon
has woken the sealed lake,
leaving a sleeve of sound. No wind,
just curved plates of air
re-shaping under the trap-ice,
straining to give; the groans and rumbles
like someone shifting heavy tables
– or something gigantic
turning to get comfortable.
I snick a stone over the long sprung deck
to get the dobro’s glassy note, the crying
slide of a bottleneck, its
tremulous ululation to the other shore.
The rocks are ice-veined; the trees
swagged with snow.
Here and there, a sudden frost
has caught some turbulence in the water
and made it solid: frozen in its distress
to a scar, or a skin-graft.
Everywhere, frost-heave has jacked up boulders
clear of the surface, and the ice-shove
has piled great slabs on the lake-edge
like luggage tumbled from a carousel.
A racket of jackdaws, the serrated call
of a falcon as I walk out onto the lake.
A living lens of ice; you can hear it bending,
breathing, re-adjusting its weight and light
as the hidden tons of water
swell and stretch underneath,
thickening with cold.
A low grumble, a lingering vibrato, creaks
that seem to echo back and forth for hours;
the lake is talking to itself. A loud
twang in the ice. Twitterings
in the railway lines
from a train about to arrive.
A pencilled-in silence,
hollow and provisional.
And then it comes.
The detonating crack, like a gun
or a dropped plank,
as if the whole lake has snapped in two
and the world will follow,
falling into fracture.
But all that happens
is a huge release of sound: a boom
that rolls under the ice for miles,
some fluked leviathan let loose
from centuries of sleep, trying to push through,
shaking the air like sheet metal, deep
and percussive as a muffled giant drum.
I hear the lake all night, like a distant war.
In the morning’s brightness,
I brush the snow off with a glove,
smooth down a porthole in the crust
and find, somehow, the living green beneath.
The green leaf looks back and sees
a man walking out in this shuddering light
to the sound of air under the ice,
out onto the lake, among sun-cups,
snow penitents: a drowned man
waked in this weathering ground.
First read this on Roy Marshall's Favouite Poem of the week and it made me cry. Loved your choices too. Thanks
That's really great. Enigmatic and beautifully imagined.
Delete