Doug Roy, Words of Wisdom, Cut Paper
ICE IN NOVEMBER
To try to stay alive,
the sparrows huddle in trees,
like bees in a hive.
This is November.
It’s brutal weather.
One’s heart and mind
are frozen like this river,
though it still moves,
under the surface ice.
The sky is bluish gray.
It’s melancholy.
That’s how it seems to me.
It dominates my dreams.
A poet uses poetic language,
but I’m like those sparrows,
with only one desire,
as I use borrowed words,
attempting to start my fire.
______________
George Freek
Review by Jared Pearce
I like the picture of the cold best here: the birds, the ice, the river all stopped moving, and then the speaker who has to admit that all one has is a perspective. Yeah, it is a terrible November.
Review by Ben Sloan
The spare, reduced aspects of these two poems, complementing one another, has a frozen hardness to it. A reader climbs down the poem’s short lines, each presenting a tough, stoical, nature-anchored reality, towards a realization of how the outer aspects of a winter landscape reflecting how the poet, surrounded by bitter cold and snow uses the act of writing poetry as a way to start a fire inside oneself. There is a strong appeal to the no-nonsense, minimalist, not-one-word-wasted, tell-it-like-it-is, honest aspect of poems. They make me think of someone who lives in the far north and is accustomed to and, over the years, has been toughened by the difficulties of a winter-dominated life.