Winter Prophecies

Neil Querengesser taught in the Department of English, University of Calgary, Alberta.

There is a cold stark beauty about the poems in Winter Prophecies that, like the sight of a brilliant snow-covered landscape, sweeps the mind absolutely clean. This book is similar in some respects to an earlier volume, Conflicts of Spring (1981), and is thematically concerned with natural cycles, although one should not assume that the title of this book signifies the end of any cycle. The great subjects, which Gustafson treats with such insight and mere elegance, are all here in this volume — life, nature, philosophy, music, love, and death — his sharply etched landscapes, as always, revealing the essence of something beyond themselves. His vision of nature is an affirmative one which nevertheless grows out of hard-won recognition that there is “no getting around it. Death.” Natural cycles ultimately triumph, in poems such as “Only the Seasons.” Several poems in this volume are worth mentioning, but perhaps the most appropriate is the first section from “An Elegy for Discourse,” “The Irremovable Ut”:

The blank which the printer sends
In the signatures to be corrected,
The page marked ‘blank’ in pencil at the
front,
Is the ultimate poem, I suppose.
The purest poem, But no fun.
Nothing like. The joy is words …

Gustafson’s sense of joy and fun permeates this collection of poems which deal with the most serious aspects of living. Winter Prophecies is a well crafted and inspired collection of poetry.