The sunshine, temperatures and flora suggest that spring is here to stay, though I wouldn’t be surprised by a return of the cold and wet in March. We live in the wrong part of the UK for snow lovers; we didn’t get any snow this winter, apart from some early-morning flurries one day when I was fast asleep. My seasonal reading consisted of a lesser-known posthumous poetry collection, a record of a sea voyage past Greenland, and a silly children’s book.

Winter Trees by Sylvia Plath (1971)

A prefatory note from Ted Hughes explains that these poems “are all out of the batch from which the Ariel poems were more or less arbitrarily chosen and they were all composed in the last nine months of Sylvia Plath’s life.” Ariel is much the stronger collection. There are only 19 poems here; the final one, “Three Women,” is more of a play (subtitled “A Poem for Three Voices”) set on a maternity ward. Motherhood is a central concern throughout. There’s harsh, unpleasant language around womanhood in general. The opening title poem is a marvel of artistic imagery, assonance and internal rhyme, but also contains a metaphor that made me cringe: “Knowing neither abortions nor bitchery, / Truer than women, / They seed so effortlessly!”

That paints motherhood as hard won, as “Childless Woman” reinforces by turning purposeless menstruation into a horror story with its vocabulary of “a child’s shriek” — “Spiderlike” — “Uttering nothing but blood— / Taste it, dark red!” — “My funeral” — “the mouths of corpses”. Plath was certainly ambivalent about babies (“Thalidomide” is particularly frightening) but I bristled at childlessness being linked with living only for oneself. Then again, pretty much everything – men, God, travel, animals – is portrayed negatively here. “Winter Trees” is the single poem I’d anthologize. (University library)

Published by Faber, so counts for #ReadIndies

Boundless: Adventures in the Northwest Passage by Kathleen Winter (2015)

I read this excellent travel book slowly, over most of the winter, including during that surreal period when He Who Shall Not Be Named was threatening to annex Greenland. Winter was invited to be a writer-in-residence aboard an icebreaker travelling through the Northwest Passage, past southwest Greenland and threading between the islands of the Canadian Arctic. She was prepared: a friend had taught her that the only thing to say in these sorts of lucky, unexpected scenarios is “My bags are already packed.” Her ‘getaway bag’ of two pairs of underwear, a T-shirt, a pair of jeans, and a LBD wasn’t exactly Arctic-ready, but she still had a head start. She adds an old concertina and worn hiking boots that resemble “lobes of some mushroom cracked off the bole of an old warrior tree.”

It’s not a long or gruelling trip, so there’s not much of the bellyaching that bores me in trekking books. Winter is interested in everything: birds, folk music, Indigenous arts and crafts, her fellow passengers’ stories, the infamous lost Arctic expeditions, and her family’s history in England and Canada. She collects her scraps of notes in a Ziploc, and that’s what this book is – a grab bag. Winter is enthusiastic yet prioritizes quiet epiphanies about the sacredness of land and creatures over thrills – though their vessel does get stranded on rocks and requires a Coast Guard rescue. It would be interesting to reread her Orange Prize-shortlisted novel about an intersex person, Annabel. (If you hanker to go deeper about Greenland, read This Cold Heaven by Gretel Ehrlich and Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow by Peter Høeg.) (Secondhand – Bas Books)

& A bonus children’s book:

The Snow Womble by Elisabeth Beresford; illus. Margaret Gordon (1975) – I thought this would be a cute one to read even though I’m unfamiliar with the Wombles. But it’s just a one-note extended joke about the creatures not being able to tell their snowman version of Great-Uncle Bulgaria apart from the real one. The best thing about reading this was the frontispiece’s juxtaposition of elements: the computer-printed bookplate, the nominal secondhand price (withdrawn from London Borough of Sutton Public Libraries), and the wholly inappropriate inscription Grandad Nick chose from King Lear! (Little Free Library)