Frost Flowers

The poems in Frost Flowers by Winifred Hughes plunge, open-eyed and open-hearted, into the natural world—its seasonal rhythms and impenetrable mysteries, its vanishings, its incorrigible quality of being alive.  They seek to chronicle the encounter between the non-human and the all-too-human, the passion and longing of our species as we relate to our natural environment, both apart from it and a part of it.  Like the swallows and tanagers and foxes, like the box elder and frostweed, we are transitory creatures living in vivid moments.  These poems are propelled by curiosity, precise observation, and a sense of wonder; they are a searching, a probing into the secrets at the heart of natural processes, which are the fundamental processes of life and death.  The natural world appears under all its contradictory aspects—sharp stones in a streambed, hatchlings clinging to their precarious nest, wildflowers that are both beautiful and poisonous, the exuberance and overflowing life of a flock of blackbirds.  In the midst of such fullness and blossoming, there is always the possibility of frost, whether nipping early buds or being transformed into late-blooming flowers made of ice.  Like our fellow species, from hardwood trees growing slowly over centuries to small passerines with speeded-up metabolisms, we are subject to the passage of time; before we can quite grasp it, our moment is gone.  Throughout, we are inextricably bound up in our natural context, in the wild places and wildlife that are increasingly threatened by human activity.