Wintering Over by Susannah Lee

To read Wintering Over is, in part, to eavesdrop on the interior voices of contemplatives who speak of what’s singular and sacred: small joys, doubts, daily or seasonal tasks, and the experience of living through the cold dark waiting for light’s benediction.  Labor is hard, joys are deep though sometimes fleeting; difficulties may be eased by simple attention, by being “schooled by lichen to seek light in the most meager of places.”  In Wintering Over, the Arctic and the vast natural world are a holy presence of which Susannah Lee writes with exquisite and sustaining intricacy (though her humor is discreet and may sneak up on the reader.) This is a taut, particularly beautiful and unique array of poems.

–Jody (Pamela) Stewart, author of This Momentary World, Selected Poems

In Susannah Lee’s Wintering Over, nine Carmelite sisters sail across the North Sea to Norway, to “the fjords who are my cousins.” Facing the “tumbled doing and undoing of tides,” the narrator “sang to the cauled wake behind us, cradling the weight of afterlife.” The canonical hours frame the nuns’ work and prayer: their “cloistered lives lived in a fierce climate” rise out of the page until we enter its three-dimensional space.

Lee plunges us into an arctic winter with “the ice-pilling wool of cloak, waistband, and failure,” where “the hunger moon is brittle.” Throughout the book, darkness, too, is alive. “Night has rolled down on night”; “the moonless moon has turned to embrace the dark” or wanes away into a “slivered moon gone dark.” The nun’s faith, infused with the natural world, takes on a sort of animism. And this world’s beauty also moves another speaker (later in the book and living in a temperate climate) to rejoice in birds who soar in “forked flight”, a world where a “great blue heron carries the air.”

I know of no recent poetry collection that matches Wintering Over for lyricism.

–Deborah Warren, author most recently of Connoisseurs of Worms and Strange to Say: Etymology for Serious Entertainment