Open Winter

WINNER OF THE 2011 BELLDAY POETRY PRIZE These poems possess a quiet urgency—an elegant, stark beauty. The speaker wonders “What minimum: can I say.” The line “radiates/its own idea of bareness.” The sentences are prisms conjugating light. But there is also an unsettling quality to this work that continually questions itself and resolutely insists on remaining open to possibility and fluctuation. I'm deeply impressed by the strikingly original combination of delicacy and rigor—the seemingly effortless way the focus shifts from outer landscapes to “the sky we have inside.” Elaine Equi I can think of no poet's first book in recent years that has given me as much pleasure as Rae Gouirand's Open Winter, and I can think of no other poet whose descriptive abilities are as acutely tuned to the gradations of atmosphere—cold, stars, qualities of air and light and celestial bodies. Gouirand breaks with common syntax and repunctuates the world in stops and starts as she reaches toward new ways to parse the complexities of love. Open Winter shows us how language breaks and fails, how poems repair and revive. Mark Wunderlich Rae Gouirand's poems glow with motion and stillness, the richness of consciousness, as they delicately enlarge the boundaries of comprehension and desire. The sense of scale—infinitesimal to vast—is capacious as mind itself. The most reticent stars can be seen only if you look to the side of where they shine. Open Winter uses this slant approach to access areas of perception and feeling that only can be reached obliquely. A complex innerness gleams through the cracks of the language, the white space between syntaxes: an interruption that sings. These fragmented, oscillating lyrics consider a terrain between nameable states, a site of incipience as well as boundary. “There is nothing not plural” Gouirand writes, and her lines implode with echoed words, a corrugated grammar that unfolds under our eyes, emergent as song or breath. “Ink kindles, heightens, takes its final place,” she notes, in lines that beautifully eulogize inscription. Open Winter offers a shimmering geometry of cognition in visionary poems that witness the erotic ligatures between self and world. It is a generative—and deeply generous—book.Alice Fulton