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Poetry, chapbook, 24 pages, from Bottlecap Features.
Snowblink follows a single winter landscape across ten sections, each edging deeper into the relationship between observation and object. Snow falls on snow, light enters snow’s surface and then its interior, and the poems steadily move from photorealistic natural detail into abstraction and recursion. The radically spare, often one-word lines gesture toward silence.
The chapbook’s title names an optical phenomenon: the white glow on the underside of clouds caused by light reflecting off snow-covered ground. It is a figure for a poetic method of positioning world and poem so they glancingly register one another. Using an Objectivist mode, the chapbook pursues a pastoral minimalism stripped of sentiment, with a focus on revealing place through attention so sustained it becomes hallucinatory.
Snowblink gets stranger as it goes, passing on from sycamore branches into tautological grammar and visual experiment, ultimately following the snow all the way down into limits of silence, white space, and fields with emptiness that absorbs nearly everything.
Jim McDermott, Ph.D., is the author of two nonfiction books, Literary Minimalism and A Comfortable Range, and of the poetry chapbooks Closing Up for Winter and Least. He is a recipient of the Bevel Summers Prize from Shenandoah, and his essays, poems, and short stories also appear in Barely South, Bluestem, Broad River Review, New Limestone Review, Prime Number, Stymie, and other journals. He lives with his family in Virginia.