New wave of writers bring warmth to winter in poetry and prose

FAMILIARITY with contemporary poetry writing in English eases one’s passage through this most enjoyable tome, and even a nodding acquaintance with Cal Lowell and his contemporaries, including Berryman and Elizabeth Bishop, or, closer to home, Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, helps distil the purity from the precis-like quality of the analysis. 

Commissioned to be selective and chose writers new and old for an anthology celebrating the season of winter in poetry and prose, Melissa Harrison didn’t take any short cuts by opting for the familiar — Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, JA Baker — but instead created her own rattle-bag of contributions, which makes this volume compelling reading for anyone who may feel they have read enough about winter.

What is original about this collection is not just the diversity of relatively unknown talent on show, but the quality of the work, even if the editor’s preference is for prose over poetry. There are familiar faces — Roger Deakin, John Fowles, Robert Macfarlane — though I was surprised by the omission of two contemporary chroniclers of what it means to live with and endure the split personality of winter on a day-to-day basis: James Rebanks, whose ‘The Shepherd’s Life’ is evocative of an existence, fast disappearing, on the periphery, and Philip Marsden’s ‘Rising Ground’, a chronology of Britain’s attitude to place.