Love in Winter missing Ryan

“Love in Winter Missing Ryan reaches for the art of poetry to clothe a father’s naked grief.

“Love in Winter collects poems written in the long season of grief. As its speaker navigates the first winter after his son’s suicide, winter proves to be more than just a few months’ passage: it becomes a season of the soul.

“Divided into five sections, these sixty poems are occasionally endmarked with the season and year of their composition. The implied chronology is linear. While time may be experienced linearly, grief and memory aren’t, so this organization fights against the narrative impulse of the poems’ wider arc. Assembling a story from the raw, often abstract emotions and contexts of the volume requires a significant amount of work off of the page. High on dissonance and with occasional narrative gestures, these poems are an assemblage of emotions, experiences, memories, and images that imply rather than state their purposes.

“Snows of a Dream” stands as the volume’s ars poetica, stating,

“There’s a sprawling range to the selected poems that exhibits the tension between the title’s two elements. “Love in Winter” and “Missing Ryan” are both powerful engines, and their union opens up a broad space for exploration. Winter, birds, and nature; religion, art, and fate; and rituals, history, and tragedy are frequent themes. The poems themselves range from intensely personal and almost spare reflections to long narratives that explore the interconnection between the speaker’s personal history and outside events.

“Often, the connections the speaker finds between his personal grief and the larger world are surprising. In poems like “Ghost from Eden,” parental grief offers him a point of intercession into Middle Eastern domestic terrorism while also illustrating grief’s demanding, avaricious self-absorption.

“There’s an open-endedness to many of the poems. The shorter poems are the least affected, their brevity lending itself to easier intuitive leaps between the content and its implications. What happens in the leap is often beautiful, as in “I Know the Moon,” which opens with “I know the moon by science” and closes with “I know by science you are gone.” The poem’s imagery and language carry a vast, unspoken freight.

“I know the moon by science
know slow veiling
of the clouds could be
a means to measure
intervening distances
the light refracted from
a middle star behind
the night of Earth I study
close–this dark ocean
as another life apart–surf
a pounding metronome.

So by this night’s moon rising
surf’s sounding like the universe
I know by science you are gone.”

October, ‘03

— I Know the Moon

“In “Compelled to Witness,” the speaker states, “Art’s a poor man’s sable / a father’s threadbare comfort.”

Love in Winter reaches for art to clothe a father’s naked grief, grasping onto whatever impulse is offered, no matter how raw or disparate it seems, no matter how far afield it takes him.”

LETITIA MONTGOMERY-RODGERS Foreword Reviews (ay 20, 2019