About the Book
The poems in Frost Flowers by Winifred Hughes plunge, open-eyed and open-hearted, into the natural world--its seasonal rhythms and impenetrable mysteries, its vanishings, its incorrigible quality of being alive. They seek to chronicle the encounter between the non-human and the all-too-human, the passion and longing of our species as we relate to our natural environment, both apart from it and a part of it. Like the swallows and tanagers and foxes, like the box elder and frostweed, we are transitory creatures living in vivid moments. These poems are propelled by curiosity, precise observation, and a sense of wonder; they are a searching, a probing into the secrets at the heart of natural processes, which are the fundamental processes of life and death. The natural world appears under all its contradictory aspects--sharp stones in a streambed, hatchlings clinging to their precarious nest, wildflowers that are both beautiful and poisonous, the exuberance and overflowing life of a flock of blackbirds. In the midst of such fullness and blossoming, there is always the possibility of frost, whether nipping early buds or being transformed into late-blooming flowers made of ice. Like our fellow species, from hardwood trees growing slowly over centuries to small passerines with speeded-up metabolisms, we are subject to the passage of time; before we can quite grasp it, our moment is gone. Throughout, we are inextricably bound up in our natural context, in the wild places and wildlife that are increasingly threatened by human activity.
About the Author :
Winifred Hughes is a writer, editor, and active birder living in Princeton, NJ. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Atlanta Review, The Literary Review, International Poetry Review, and Appalachia, among other journals. "Dyslexic" has been recorded for the Poetry Foundation's permanent audio archive. "Kingfishers Catch Fire" won the 2014 Wild Leaf Press poetry award. Her chapbook, Nine-Bend Bridge, won the 2015 Red Berry Editions summer chapbook competition. She has been the recipient of two independent artist fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Currently she leads bird walks in the local wildlife refuge and teaches a course in literature and nature at the Watershed Institute in Pennington, NJ.
Review :
These poems are "irresistibly alive." From phragmites to frostweed, from bitterns to catbirds to vireos, they are animated, even populated, by a precision of care that is a matter not only of the eye but of the heart. There's transience here as well, and solitude--a parting, a deserted house, shattered blossoms, memory that is only "the shape of waves," frost flowers that vanish with the heat of our touch. Which is our life, the poems ask, what stays or what flows away, and how should we live it and write it? "If it goes unrecorded, will the moment be / lost or more itself?"
James Richardson, author of During: Poems and Aphorisms and Interglacial: New and
Selected Poems and Aphorisms, finalist for the Book Critics Circle Award
Whether Winifred Hughes is singing the "Small-Leaf Rhodendron in December" with its "soft furls of flesh. . . set trembling in a wind/ that will soon turn northerly" or the slow life of trees from "frugal, unobtrusive" saplings that make do with "filtered light," she brings her delight and deep knowledge of the natural world to us in Frost Flowers. We hear the catbird she is banding as she lifts it to her ear to listen to its "wild/ heart of living so intensely it is almost/ death." An avid birder and elegant poet in the great Romantic tradition, Hughes sings flickers and squawks, feathered engines and florets, vireos and bitterns in these satisfying poems which, like her seedpods, spill their centers for us to hear and see.
Lois Marie Harrod, poet and teacher, author of Nightmares of the Minor Poet
The poems of Winifred Hughes place us in the world of nature, our senses heightened among shifting clouds of blackbirds and the icy grip of the Stony Brook. Wielding more than keen observation and the deft use of language, the poet transports us with her deep sense of intimacy and unwavering curiosity as she chronicles the ways of nature.
Jeff Hoagland, haiku poet and Director of Education at the Watershed Institute
