Winter Windows by Shana Youngdahl
– Reviewed by Caroline M Davies –
Shana Youngdahl’s Winter Windows is a twenty-one page pamphlet containing two linked poems: ‘Winter’ and ‘Windows’. In these poems, Youngdahl uses delicate, precise language to explore the fears and dilemmas of becoming and being a parent.
She opens with an apocalyptic vision of what is happening to bats across America:
The bats are dying.
White fungusblooms on noses, spreads
in spots to wings and wakensthem early from sleep…
The poem continues with other signs of disorder and of climate change:
Now students build a slumping snowman
in their mud-season boots, pretending
it’s late March and expected. ..
All the while, the baby is growing in utero, with all the concerns that you have as a parent; will the baby be healthy, and what kind of a world is she going to be born into? I found myself revisiting my own experience of being pregnant, anxious but also expectant. Ultimately the message in the first poem, ‘Winter’, is one of hope.
Four rooms I need
to believe in: chambersthat hold the riches of oxygenated blood;
the house I hope remains
when I am gone.
In the second section, ‘Windows’, there are now two daughters growing up and reaching to the world outside through windows which are both barriers and a means of escape.
On the first hot day of the season
we open the windows along
the front of the house. screenless.
My daughter
is lifted through;
she laughs,
clambering between worlds.
The book ends with the familiar tug of parenthood, in which you let go but want them to come back
… Please
when you pass through the glassand into the darkness beyond my sight
don’t forget the thumbprintsyou left on me. The path
back in…..
Winter/Windows is published by Miel whose aim is to publish difficult, interesting, intelligent and deeply felt work. This pamphlet definitely fulfils most of these criteria, especially intelligent and deeply-felt, but I found the poems engaging and well-crafted rather than difficult. Youngdahl uses a spare style of writing without a word being wasted, and I found myself returning for another read.
This is Youngdahl’s third chapbook, and follows the publication of her first collection, History, Advice and Other Half Truths.