Frost Flowers by Winifred Hughes, NWVS #147

These poems are “irresistibly alive.” From phragmites to frostweed, from bitterns to catbirds to vireos, they are animated, even populated, by a precision of care that is a matter not only of the eye but of the heart. There’s transience here as well, and solitude — a parting, a deserted house, shattered blossoms, memory that is only “the shape of waves,” frost flowers that vanish with the heat of our touch. Which is our life, the poems ask, what stays or what flows away, and how should we live it and write it? “If it goes unrecorded, will the moment be / lost or more itself?”

–James Richardson, author of During: Poems and Aphorisms and Interglacial: New and Selected Poems and Aphorisms, finalist for the Book Critics Circle Award

Whether Winifred Hughes is singing the “Small Leaf Rhodendron in December” with its “soft furls of flesh. . . set trembling in a wind/ that will soon turn northerly” or the slow life of trees from “frugal, unobtrusive” saplings that make do with “filtered light,” she brings her delight and deep knowledge of the natural world to us in Frost Flowers. We hear the catbird she is banding as she lifts it to her ear to listen to its “wild/ heart of living so intensely it is almost/ death.” An avid birder and elegant poet in the great Romantic tradition, Hughes sings flickers and squawks, feathered engines and florets, vireos and bitterns in these satisfying poems which, like her seedpods, spill their centers for us to hear and see.

–Lois Marie Harrod, poet and teacher, author of Nightmares of the Minor Poet

“The poems of Winifred Hughes place us in the world of nature, our senses heightened among shifting clouds of blackbirds and the icy grip of the Stony Brook. Wielding more than keen observation and the deft use of language, the poet transports us with her deep sense of intimacy and unwavering curiosity as she chronicles the ways of nature.”

–Jeff Hoagland, haiku poet and Director of Education at the Watershed Institute