Reasons for Winter

By Naomi Guttman

Winner of the 1992 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry (QSPELL, now the Quebec Writers Federation) and shortlisted for the 1991 Pat Lowther Award

Naomi Guttman's first collection of poems marks the appearance of a deeply emotional, highly intelligent new voice. Its theme is intimacy -- ours, especially women's, experience of intimacy in many forms, how it marks us, how we long for it, the ways in which it is both our fulfilment and our undoing. The personae range from children to old men and women, jailbirds to schoolgirls; the language is chosen without ever becoming deliberate, precise but always musical. These are poems from and of the heart, chastened by experience, taut with craft.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brick Books
• Release date: Nov 1, 1991
• ISBN: 9781771312370

Naomi Guttman

Naomi Guttman's first book of poems, Reasons for Winter, won the A.M. Klein Award for Poetry. Her second, Wet Apples, White Blood, was co-winner of the Adirondack Center for Writing's Best Book of Poems for 2007. The Banquet of Donny & Ari: Scenes from the Opera is her third poetry collection. Raised in Montreal, she now teaches creative writing at Hamilton College in Clinton, NY.

Book preview

Reasons for Winter

Naomi Guttman

Reasons for Winter

Brick Books

CANADIAN CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Guttman, Naomi

Reasons for winter

Poems.

ISBN 0-91926-51-3

I. Title

PS8563.U77R4 1991      c8n′.54      C91-094187-4

PR9199.3.G87R4 1991

Copyright © Naomi Guttman, 1991.

The support of The Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council is gratefully acknowledged by Brick Books.

Cover Art: ‘Persephone Revisits the Earth.’ Copyright © 1989 by Tisa Tyree. First published in Calyx, A Journal of Art and Literature by Women, Winter 1990/91, Volume 13, No. 1. Photograph of the author by Jonathan Mead.

Brick Books

www.brickbooks.ca

Box 20081

431 Boler Road

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N6K 4G6

Canada

For my parents, with gratitude and love.

Contents

I.    White Night

White Night

Notre Dame de Grâce

Incubation

Deficiencies of Human Air

Amphibian

Triad at six a.m.

Marmalade

April in Winter

Mail

Hibiscus

The Panda Says Goodbye

Median with Weeds

II.   The Mountain

Uncle Daniel's Painting, 1886

Wheel and Clay

Palimpsest

Autoportrait

The Gift

Leave

Country

A Little Pain

Whose Child

Shelter

The Mountain

March

Polishings

III.  Reasons for Winter

Ginette

He Is

The Mistake

Sudden Death

Thanksgiving/Yom Kippur

What We Miss

Insomnia

Reasons for Winter

Emergency

Thin Air

Eight Floors

Wildlife

I. White Night

White Night

When I sleep every night

What am I called or not called?

And when I wake, who am I

if I was not while I slept? – Pablo Neruda

The bathroom light is a beacon

to my parents' door: black crack

at the end of the hall. Radiators

sigh, the house shivers like a dreaming dog.

Awake and rigid I think

of all the people like me – in bed,

how no one's exactly like me,