The Snow Watcher: Poems

by Chase Twichell

"Reading the poems in The Snow Watcher is like breathing cold air.... they are full of sharp observation, both of the world and herself, unsentimental poems with a sinewy intellectual toughness"— The Washington Post The Snow Watcher is a sequence of poems that asks a single obsession what is the self? The book is a radical re-envisioning of what makes us human rather than animal, human rather than insentient. The poems delve into parts of childhood more comfortably forgotten, and into the ancient stillness of the monastery (Twichell is a student of Zen Buddhism). In both realms the known self dissolves, or is intentionally dismantled, and what is left is something impossible to name, though its startling voice can be heard in the austere, near-empty rooms of these poems.

Genres: Poetry, 20th Century

80 pages, Paperback

First published October 17, 1998

Reviews

[Ken]

By coincidence, this is the second poetry collection I've read that published in the 90s, and my, how trends change in a few decades. Both the David Bottoms title (Armored Hearts) and this book are heavily invested in nature. Today's poetry? Not so much.

Also, Chase Twichell devotes more than a few poems to Buddhist themes, to the point where some half dozen poem titles start as "Imaginary Dokusan" followed by a colon and the poem's topic. In the Notes we learn that a dokusan is "a private interview with the teacher, in which the student demonstrates his changing consciousness and receives guidance."

Here are three samplings from the book:


Road Tar

A kid said you could chew road tar
if you got it before it cooled,
black globule with a just-forming skin.
He said it was better than cigarettes.
He said he had a taste for it.

On the same road, a squirrel
was doing the Watusi to free itself
from its crushed hindquarters.
A man on a bicycle stomped on its head,
then wiped his shoe on the grass.

It was autumn, the adult word for fall.
In school we saw a film called Reproduction.
The little snake-father poked his head
into the slippery future,
and a girl with a burned tongue was conceived.


Paint

Lotions and scents, ripe figs,
raw silk, the cat's striped pelt...
Fat marbles the universe.

I want to be a faint pencil line
under the important words,
the ones that tell the truth.

Delicious, the animal trace
of the brush in the paint,
crushed caviar of molecules.

A shadow comes to me and says,
When you go, please leave
the leafless branch unlocked.

I paint the goat's yellow eye,
and the latch on truth's door.
Open, eye and door.


The Verge

Inside language there was always
an inkling,
a dark vein branching,

bird-tracks in river sand spelling out
the fact of themselves,

asking me to come toward them
and scratch among them with a stick
all the secrets I could no longer keep,

until my words were nothing
but lovely anarchic bird-prints themselves.

I think that's the verge right there,
where the two languages
intertwine, twigs and thorns,

words telling secrets
to no one but river and rain.

[Clare · Rating 4 out of 5]

Last week I had a dream where I gave away anything, then sat down in my house to think long and hard. The next morning I walked into a bookshop, picked up some poetry that I had never heard of and opened the page randomly at a poem entitled, "The Year I Got Rid of Everything". Reading it seemed a direct evocation of my dream - "a dress made of bones", dancing in the great emptiness. So, dear reader, I bought it. I couldn't just leave it in the shop.

Chase Twichell's poetry is limpid and bewitching - metaphors and similes slip and slide into one another. She is constantly tweaking your tail, teasing you with puns and wordplay. However, alongside the undoubted skill of her poetry there is a great melancholy - a deep wish to understand the essence of a thing beneath a word - to inhabit a thing rather than to describe it. These poems are a product of her decision to train as a Buddhist - many of the poems are described as Dokusans - where a monk might interview a pupil in order to see how well they are beginning to understand living in the here and now. Fragments and shards of perception and experience melt into one another as she struggles towards a peace that the whole collection seems to be aiming towards. Twichell often takes loosely the form of the tanka, using the structure of an upper phrase and lower phrase split across two stanzas - this forms a constant echoing structure where ideas introduced in the first stanza are reintroduced and turned over to form a different view in the second. Each poem, therefore requires some work on the part of the reader, examining and noticing the patterns and conversations within each poem. This isn't always a straightforward, linear process.

The last poems in the collection are not described as dokusans and yet take a very similar form and are addressed to the reader. They made me smile when I read them - Margaret Atwood once claimed that your writing should never be written with the view to an audience. Instead, one should imagine one hand writing whilst the other erased all that had gone before. This must have been in order to prevent self-consciousness or that other great failing, trying too hard. Twichell turns this on it's head however - not only does she imagine the audience but directly address it. Yet this is charming and the whole crowning point of the poetry - a kind of dreadful honesty about failed communication - each feeling and sensation struggling to be expressed in each present moment. And yet that experiment is essentially doomed to fail - "where the cold tracks of language/ collapse into cinders, unburnable trash".

[Karl Nehring · Rating 4 out of 5]

Spare but haunting poems reflective of Buddhist practice and an alert, probing mind. Some of the poems are subtly disturbing, hinting of dark times in the author's past, but others are hopeful and insightful. Twichell manages to convey a poetic persona that is both probing and playful. Overall, a crisp and bracing read.

[R.L. Martinez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Each poem is a total gut-punch. in a good way :)

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

We're used to seeing Zen written of in the way of the Beat poets. Chase Twichell has opened another path in this superb book. I can't think of a better poet conveying the actual experience of entering practice. Perhaps because Twichell is first a poet--the subject matter here is particular, but the sheer talent is what lets her write about Zen overtly in a way that is not ponderous, didactic, or imitative of either the Beats or the classical Buddhist poets of Japan, Korea, and China.

[Kathryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quite simply, this is my favorite book of poetry. Bar none. I've read it countless times and will undoubtedly read it countless more. Twichell writes exceptionally spare and beautiful poems using thought and imagery from Buddhism, the natural world, and the very personal.

[Alessandra Simmons · Rating 3 out of 5]

Loved the stillness and imagery in these poems

[Miriam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes so clear and perceptive, it took my breath away. A dark, empty, yet somehow hopeful book of poems to savour.

[Mills College Library]

811.54 T972s 1998