This Long Winter (The Cox Family Poetry Chapbook Series)
Description
A luminous collection of modern metaphysical poems.
This Long Winter contains poems that are meditations on life in the rural world: reflections on hard work, aging, and the ravages of time—erasures that Sutphen attempts to ameliorate with her careful attention to language. These poems move us from delight in precise description to wisdom and solace in the things of this world. Noticing its details, the snowflakes, clementines, the lilies, the cardinal’s call, is the key for this momentary stay against time that comes at us in a rush. The many mirror images in these poems point to the complexity and hard, loving work of really living in the world. And now, in the deep mid-winter, deep in the enforced slowdown of this pandemic, we need these poems to help us know what to do with the past and how to live and how to love.
Praise for This Long Winter (The Cox Family Poetry Chapbook Series)
“How rare to see lyric tenderness sustained over years with no stumble into sentimentality. This remarkable collection wields a keen blade of attention, a nonchalant elegance. The reigning landscape is the Minnesota family farm of Sutphen’s girlhood, a world lost not only to her but to America.”
— Patricia Hampl
“The writing . . . is faultless. . . . And even more satisfying is the fact that this brilliant technique justifies and is justified by the truth value of these poems, which usher us into the reality of time, change, loss, and memory’s belated and beautiful insights.”
— Vijay Seshadri
“Sutphen shows us the very heart and soul of her working, rooted prairie people, as shy of being caught in a poem as they once were reluctant to be photographed, but perfectly captured for us in this sweeping account of life that is both specific and universal. A stunning collection of poems.”
— Anne-Marie Fyfe
