Chase Twichell, "A Negative of Snow"

White Pelicans--very rare, I'm told

A Negative of Snow by Chase Twichell : The Poetry Foundation

Chase Twichell's "A Negative of Snow" is a brutally honest poem about a daughter's father-love. The first verse paragraph is a superb set-up for the shift to a somewhat different subject at the poem's center. In that opening, I especially love this (note that Ms. Twichell's reading somehow, oddly omits the first verse paragraph):

     It was my job to carry the birds.

     I’d have them all plucked

     by the time we got back to the car.

     On the walk out I’d look

     for puddles I’d missed

     and break them. 

These lines prepare us both beautifully and awfully for the tough facts to come. The daughter can
pluck birds efficiently, probably better than any boy, and she makes sure she fractures
every iced puddle she comes across. She is no softie; she knows anger. And that dramatizes, by
contrast, her softer filial affections as the rest of the poem develops, adding one cold complication
to another.

The season, of course, is winter; it almost has to be. So I've added Florida shore birds as balance.

Roseate Spoonbill, flanked by White Ibises, in Synchronized Flea Biting


[Blogspot is again fighting me on formatting above, after the quotation. Hope you can ignore it].

A Negative of Snow by Chase Twichell : The Poetry Foundation