This Long Winter

by Joyce Sutphen

A luminous collection of modern metaphysical poems.

This Long Winter  contains poems that are meditations on life in the rural reflections on hard work, aging, and the ravages of time—erasures that Sutphen attempts to ameliorate with her careful attention to language. These poems move us from delight in precise description to wisdom and solace in the things of this world. Noticing its details, the snowflakes, clementines, the lilies, the cardinal’s call, is the key for this momentary stay against time that comes at us in a rush. The many mirror images in these poems point to the complexity and hard, loving work of really living in the world. And now, in the deep mid-winter, deep in the enforced slowdown of this pandemic, we need these poems to help us know what to do with the past and how to live and how to love.

 
 

Genres: Poetry

32 pages, Paperback

Published February 15, 2022

About the author

Joyce Sutphen (born 1949) is an American poet, currently serving as Minnesota's Poet Laureate. She is the state's second laureate, appointed by Governor Mark Dayton in August, 2011. Sutphen also serves as a professor of English at Gustavus Adolphus College in Saint Peter, Minnesota.

Reviews

[Dan Gobble · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nice, short collection of poems, 20 in all. A favorite, titled Blessing the World:

Blessing the World

I mean the one that surrounds us,
the one that causes such suffering
and refuses to let us go. I mean
that one,

and the one full of stupidity - the one
that some of us scroll endlessly
doom-raged and cursing - that one
especially.

I mean what world we have left
once we have covered the meadows
with housing developments
and strip malls;

I mean the poor ruined earth
beneath our deals and our markets
where everything has a price
even here,

even now - which is why
we must bless it with the part of us
that made the music and the paintings,
the bridges, the airplanes, and the dictionaries

where the word for what we will do
has not yet been invented.

(This Long Winter, Joyce Sutphen, Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2022, p. 18)

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you, like me, are awake at 4 a.m. on the cusp of a new season, you will find no better companion than the quiet voice of poet Joyce Sutphen. In her newest chapbook, This Long Winter, Sutphen gives us carefully sculpted poems that reflect the long winter of our isolation. These are poems that are bruised, tender, yet outward-looking, reflecting past to present, present to future, and where cardinals and owls and even the moon give voice to the still living world. From out of the chill of this long emotional winter, Sutphen picks at the threads of Camus' "...in the midst of winter, I learned that there was in me an invincible summer...".

Joyce Sutphen
#thislongwinter

#riverpoethansen

[Hannah]

Meaning is in the detail. If you pay
attention, I tell her, that
will be enough.