Staying the Winter by Nancy McCleery (review)

190 Western American Literature Staying the Winter. By Nancy McCleery. (Omaha: The Cummington Press, 1987. 77 pages, $20 limited edition.) Staying the Winter is foremost a book of reconciliations. A rewarding and richly-textured volume of poetry, it works toward a singular vision of a world in which all things—past and present, animate and inanimate—are unified. Drawn from memories of her youth in Nebraska and her present location in Alaska, McGleery’s poems range from the quietly imagistic, as in “Monarchs,” to the lengthy confessional, as in “Codicil to a Will.” Spare and economical, these poems are often single illuminations drawn from people or places. Read together, they form a generous and expansive collection that manages to embrace a rich variety of terrains. By setting many of her poems in the landscapes of our close and distant past—swamps, old river beds, prairies—McCleery bridges the present with an older, other time, balancing her images to create poems of surprising resonance. Look at “By the Kits-ka-toos (the Platte) ”: In June the children came from Oklahoma to stand for the first time in the sacred water. Now it is twenty below. My breath turns to fire— the river, burned by December, to bones of ice and smoke. Wind from the Dakotas slips through the cottonwoods. Overhead ride branches feathered with hoarfrost, Pawnee hunters on horseback, their women gone into the trees, the old ones, flinging white hair in the sun to dry. I look again: the Kits-ka-toos is breathing. Beneath it the roots of the trees grow deep. Perhaps the most striking quality of Staying the Winter is the way in which McCleery charges her poems with metaphoric leaps and possibilities. In one, a yellow bird flies ethereally out of the left side of her face and rises into the morning light. In another, butterflies transform into “bright flowers” at “the feet of mastodons.” In still another, an old woman weaves a tapestry of “night stars, agates, clouds of sunrise, thunderheads.” But loss and pain haunt these poems as well. In “Silent Forest, Poudre Canyon, Colorado,” “Bruise,” and “Jane Dreams,” McCleery draws the reader into her “own deep undergrowth” to a place where “cold pain” resides. In these and several other poems, she reveals an astute ability to render subtle modulations of affection and grief, loss and sustenance. Ultimately, Staying the Winter is a gathering of healing songs, the poems bridging the distances between personal and cultural histories. McCleery is a keen, compassionate observer of her—and by extension our—internal weather patterns, as well as those of the outside world. ROBERT HEDIN Wake Forest University ...