This book is a simple gathering, a collection of poems with a common theme. Winter is indeed a wild season, full of false turns and mistaken hopes. It is a time of despair and beauty. Rogasky manages to capture all of this in her selection, from the sweetened drama of Edna St. Vincent Millay to the wistful wonder of Sara Teasdale. From the familiar lyricism of William Wordsworth to the clean syntax of Japanese Haiku. If it is not all here, there is certainly very much of it; the modern and the classical, the cold and the warm. It makes an excellent introduction to winter, seen through the eyes of others, when we are meeting once again for the very first time. It is not a christmas book, exactly, for it covers the whole expanse of the season, from the "dark days of December" to the promising dawn of spring, but this very fact makes it most inviting. One of the poems here enclosed is from a longer piece called "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird". There are indeed many more ways of looking at winter, and this collection represents them all honorably, while keeping the reader in a state of happy engagement. Don your boots and set out for a sleigh ride; the season has arrived.
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