A Snowy January afternoon...

All this snowy weather seems apt after my previous entires!  Perfect weather to snuggle in with a good book or two. I have particuarly enjoyed reading Ice by Glillian Clarke, (Published by Carcanet 2012) A book of poems about winter, ice, the past and present. She evokes landscapes that are both wild and sensuous. Many lines are just simply beautiful for example  "as if her broken words were scattered stones..." and "trees stand in their bones asleep in the creak of a wind with snow on it's mind".

I particualy enjoyed her opening poem Polar

Snowlight and sunlight, the lake glacial,
Too bright to open my eyes
in the dazzle and doze
of a distant January afternoon.

It's long ago and the house naps in the plush silence
of a house asleep, like absence,
I'm dreaming on the white bears shoulder,
paddling the slow hours, my fingers in his fur.

His eyes are glass, each hair a needle of light,
He's pegged by his claws to the floor like a shirt on the line.
He is a soul. He is what death is. He is transparency,
a loosening floe on the sea.

But I want him alive.
I want him fierce
with belly and breath and growl and beating heart,
I want him dangerous.

I want to follow himover the snows
between the immaculate earth and now,
between the silence and the shot that rang
over the ice at the top of the globe,

when the map of the earth was something we knew by heart,
and they had not shot the bear,
had not loosed the ice,
had not, had not.

                  I am presently enjoying making marks in response to reading about glaciers,
                 and ice.