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April Snow
*WINNER OF THE 2011 NEW WOMEN'S VOICES SERIES PRIZE IN POETRY*
- GenresPoetry
26 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2012
5 people want to read
About the author
Oriana Ivy
4 books2 followersOriana Ivy was born in Poland and came to the United States when she was 17. Her poems, essays, book reviews, and translations from modern Polish poetry have been published in Poetry, Ploughshares, Best American Poetry 1992, Nimrod, New Letters, The Iowa Review, American Poetry Review, Black Warrior, Wisconsin Review, Prairie Schooner, Spoon River Review, Southern Poetry Review, and many other journals and anthologies. A former journalist and community college instructor, she teaches poetry workshops. She lives in San Diego.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 20, 2013
Oriana Ivy’s April Snow is a lovely little book, the crocuses of its cover suggestive of promise despite the surrounding snow that could stand for cold in its various guises: exile, conflict, disappointment.
In “Black Soup,” the poet looks back in memory as her Polish grandmother gently “strokes the long neck” of a goose before slaughter. “Her wide sleeves winnow / the feathered air” (2).
In “Eyeglasses,” Ivy recalls an anecdote in which her maternal grandparents “sift” through “tangled pairs” of looted lenses taken from other Holocaust victims who did not survive as they did. Ivy does not share her mother’s embarrassment at the tale; instead, she perceives an exquisite truth:
“Those stripped to nothing end up
with too much, except nothing
fits after reading your hands
through the glasses of the dead.
This is how beauty looks
through those eyeglasses:
blurred, skeletal,
a man and a woman
help each other up,
lean on a handcart, walk on.” (20)
In addition to poems that place her family’s history against a larger backdrop of Eastern European social conflict, Ivy also brings into focus moments from her own youth that seem intimate even when the speaker is long separated from these incidents by both time and distance. It is as if she were inviting the reader to join her on “The Gdansk Express” as she and another teen practice flirting from the safe vantage of the passing train; the objects of their attention remain little more than their occupations (workgangs, soldiers, flagmen).
Of all the poems in the chapbook, “Angel Envy” seems most revealing of the intense, spiritual questing that is so evident in Ivy’s nonfiction prose, which can be found on her blog: http://oriana-poetry.blogspot.com/. When the parochial teacher in the poem asks why humans envy angels, their eight-year-old pupils promptly answer “Wings,” and despite the nun’s patient insistence on more orthodox catechism, the adult poet still defends the accuracy of this unlearned response. And, yet, she also wonders at the nun’s admission that angels might envy humans their “bodies, soft as regret.” Readers who are aware of Ivy’s related interest in the history of psychology will also perceive the title’s subtle echo of Freudian theory as they absorb the poet’s sensual imagining of angelic inter-penetration, which is not sex, but something beyond orgasm.
For those who are not completely satisfied with the limitations of the chapbook format, I recommend Ivy’s lyrical prose writing, which can be found at the aforementioned web address. Yes, at only 25 pages, April Snow (Winner of the New Women’s Voices Prize in Poetry 2011) leaves me wanting more crocuses as well as more “[r]osaries of mushrooms” (2). Hopefully, this poet who has already published widely in renowned journals (Ploughshares, Black Warrior, Prairie Schooner) will eventually be embraced by a publisher who will grant her the space she deserves to fill a wild, but luminous garden. We could all do with more glimpses of
"surviving trees,.
one after another
split to the root by lightning:
each scar an entrance
unspoken in the green fire." (23)
[Note: numbers are for page numbers instead of lines as is usual in MLA format.]
In “Black Soup,” the poet looks back in memory as her Polish grandmother gently “strokes the long neck” of a goose before slaughter. “Her wide sleeves winnow / the feathered air” (2).
In “Eyeglasses,” Ivy recalls an anecdote in which her maternal grandparents “sift” through “tangled pairs” of looted lenses taken from other Holocaust victims who did not survive as they did. Ivy does not share her mother’s embarrassment at the tale; instead, she perceives an exquisite truth:
“Those stripped to nothing end up
with too much, except nothing
fits after reading your hands
through the glasses of the dead.
This is how beauty looks
through those eyeglasses:
blurred, skeletal,
a man and a woman
help each other up,
lean on a handcart, walk on.” (20)
In addition to poems that place her family’s history against a larger backdrop of Eastern European social conflict, Ivy also brings into focus moments from her own youth that seem intimate even when the speaker is long separated from these incidents by both time and distance. It is as if she were inviting the reader to join her on “The Gdansk Express” as she and another teen practice flirting from the safe vantage of the passing train; the objects of their attention remain little more than their occupations (workgangs, soldiers, flagmen).
Of all the poems in the chapbook, “Angel Envy” seems most revealing of the intense, spiritual questing that is so evident in Ivy’s nonfiction prose, which can be found on her blog: http://oriana-poetry.blogspot.com/. When the parochial teacher in the poem asks why humans envy angels, their eight-year-old pupils promptly answer “Wings,” and despite the nun’s patient insistence on more orthodox catechism, the adult poet still defends the accuracy of this unlearned response. And, yet, she also wonders at the nun’s admission that angels might envy humans their “bodies, soft as regret.” Readers who are aware of Ivy’s related interest in the history of psychology will also perceive the title’s subtle echo of Freudian theory as they absorb the poet’s sensual imagining of angelic inter-penetration, which is not sex, but something beyond orgasm.
For those who are not completely satisfied with the limitations of the chapbook format, I recommend Ivy’s lyrical prose writing, which can be found at the aforementioned web address. Yes, at only 25 pages, April Snow (Winner of the New Women’s Voices Prize in Poetry 2011) leaves me wanting more crocuses as well as more “[r]osaries of mushrooms” (2). Hopefully, this poet who has already published widely in renowned journals (Ploughshares, Black Warrior, Prairie Schooner) will eventually be embraced by a publisher who will grant her the space she deserves to fill a wild, but luminous garden. We could all do with more glimpses of
"surviving trees,.
one after another
split to the root by lightning:
each scar an entrance
unspoken in the green fire." (23)
[Note: numbers are for page numbers instead of lines as is usual in MLA format.]
October 10, 2016
I bought this book almost at random when I was evaluating the publisher. I saw that this one had won an award when it came out, so I figured it would be a good one to try, and it was. It's hard to believe that Ivy is a non-native speaker of English. Her poems demonstrate a very fine control of the language. They are a bit more formal than one usually finds these days, but I'm old-fashioned, so I didn't mind that. I most enjoyed the early poems in the collection that evoke her girlhood in Poland. I think my favorite is "Only the Horse."
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews