Winterkill

by Catherine Graham

Catherine Grahams new collection Winterkill completes the trilogy that includes her critically acclaimed previous books Pupa (2003) and The Red Element (2008). Her poems always navigate the difficult paths between grief and memory, between intimacy and strangeness, with a disarming, surefooted grace. These are her most powerful, most affirming works to date.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 2010

About the author

Catherine Graham, writer, educator and creativity consultant, was born in Hamilton, Ontario. She holds a Masters' degree in creative writing from Lancaster University in England. Her poems have been anthologized internationally, published on CBC's Sounds Like Canada website, broadcast on BBC Radio Ulster and she is included in The White Page / An Bhileog Bhan: Twentieth Century Irish Women Poets. After living for years in Northern Ireland, she now lives in Toronto, Ontario. In addition to teaching Elements of Poetry at Sheridan College, Catherine teaches creative writing at McMaster University and the University of Toronto where she was nominated for an Excellence In Teaching Award.

(from http://canpoetry.library.utoronto.ca/...)

Reviews

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I do a picture and destroy it. In the end, though, nothing is lost; the red I took away from one place turns up somewhere else.
- Pablo Picasso

Green, how much I want you green.
- Federico García Lorca

Interesting to think about the ways in which a poet uses colour. Like a painter, a poet may apply colour abundantly or sparingly. Indeed, there's an abundance of Lorca's green in Winterkill, but what of Picasso's red? Like Picasso, the red Graham took from Winterkill turns up somewhere else...

Fabric lamps set off those green
drapes that blocked
the light that wanted in
when her eyes wouldn't open.

Ever-ripe, those tulips
lolling on appliqué. Green
shams with ruffled streams. Calico
stitched with green gingham. She
gave me fragrance. She gave me green.
- Green (pg. 18)


Green like the border around our brown bungalow,
a hungry snake never lets go, feeds
until those fish scales bloat, and night
fucks the day down in the cum-smother of mauve.
- Morning Glory (pg. 25)


Is green the real

killer? Snow

the camouflage?

White white river.

Like liquid in liquid

they swim.
- White Bears (pg. 27)


They take the red from the earth.

Who shall eat the strawberries?

Who shall give the red back?
- Strawberries (pg. 54)

On the subject of painters, one of Graham's poems takes its inspiration from a painting by Kate Domina...

My body's thin like an icicle
but my fur warms, the rug of me.

I feel good in this suit. My tie,
a material icicle. It wears me well
like the mouse I wear that wears me.

See past my wolfish eyes, the wilderness
that makes the menace race
down the knucklebones of your back.

It's only the feet of my little mouse.
- Troll Was No Monster, after the painting by Kate Domina

In a number of poems (in this and other collections), Graham touches on the death of her parents. The most memorable of these poems is "I Almost Laughed At My Mother's Funeral". The poem is reminiscent of the sentiments expressed by Gregory Corso at the funeral of Jack Kerouac...

She's not in there.
- I Almost Laughed At My Mother's Funeral (pg. 33)

Cross considered dragging the corpse from the coffin and heaving it across the room: it was hypocritical, he felt, to mourn a body that no longer contained Kerouac's spirit.
- Subterranean Kerouac