Journal: Eikon
Volume: EIKON 04:2 (Fall 2022)
Article: Spending The Winter
Author: Betsy Howard

Eikon 4.2 (Fall 2022) p. 152

Spending The Winter

REVIEWED BY

Betsy Howard

Betsy Howard is Assistant Professor of Literature at Bethlehem College and Seminary.

Joseph Bottum. Spending the Winter. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2022.

Joseph Bottum’s poetry collection Spending the Winter (2022) offers a world of longing, of poetic echoes, and of laughter worked out in the lavishness of language. Bottum borrows the title of his collection from the fifth and final division of his book, as well as the final poem of the collection. If the titular repetition of “Spending the Winter” underscores winter’s sustained presence throughout, other poems — including the opening “Easter Morning” as well as “A London Frost Fair,” “Feast of the Annunciation,” and “Some Come to See the Lord: A Christmas Carol” — address winter directly, while “What Falls Was Green” and “Still Life” sustain the wintering theme from the vantage of aging and time’s ruthless passing. The sweeping meditation on transience in “What Falls Was Green,” for example, grieves over “waste” and the “loss” of everything from the organic matter to human intention while it simultaneously cultivates humility. Pedagogically, I found the poem a compelling companion to Percy Shelley’s ironic treatment of permanence in his “Ozymandias” (1818), and I paired the two poems to launch my Ancient Greek Literature course this fall.

Bottum also places winter in conversation with the other seasons. The collection’s fourth section, “Occasionals,” opens with “Four Seasons,” subtitled “A Graduation Poem,” that picks up each season in turn. In “The Four Seasons,” Bottum is quick to turn references to early spring into repartees within the large English poetic canon; Bottum’s April rains invoke both modernist T.S. Eliot and medieval Geoffrey Chaucer. Spending the Winter also resonates with the seasonal theme recurrent across Bottum’s other works, including his 2001 poetry collection The Fall and Other Poems and The Second Spring (2011), a compilation of new, popular, and folk tunes alongside arrangements of poems set to music.

Eikon 4.2 (Fall 2022) p. 153

While the collection is hardly circumscribed by winter — Bottum takes winter as a launching point rather than its boundary — his frame for the coldest, darkest season not only engages but also disciples contemporary America’s cultural fascination with metaphorical winter — or what we experience as extended seasons of scarcity, burn out, shut down, and seeming unproductivity. Katherine May’s New York Times best-selling me...