The Winter Road

by Jenkins, Louis

• ISBN13: 9780930100148
• ISBN10: 093010014X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-10-01
• Publisher: Holy Cow Pr

Summary

"Louis Jenkins writes satire as elegant as Horace but with motors in it and telephones and the North Shore."-Garrison Keillor From the acknowledged "master" of the prose poem comes a new gathering of sixty poems. The work in The Winter Road comprises an extended meditation on the nature of memory and its influence on everyday reality. Within poems that turn whimsical, ironic, and serious, whole imaginative worlds are created and glide the reader into pleasing and unexpected territory. As when Coronado's search for gold lands him empty-handed in Kansas, Jenkins reminds us that "miracles always have a cost," and that our desire for absolute truth can sometimes lead us nowhere. Louis Jenkins' poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, et al. and in The Best American Poetry 1999. He lives in Duluth, Minnesota.Old Man Winter Old man Winter doesn't like anything. He doesn't like dogs or cats or squirrels or birds, especially seagulls, or children or smart-ass college students. He doesn't like loggers or environ- mentalists or snowmobilers or skiers in their stupid lycra outfits. He doesn't like Christmas or television. He doesn't like bureau- crats, lawyers or pliticians. There is a thing or two he could say to the host of the local talk-radio show but he knows for a fact that the son-of-a-bitch does the broadcast from his condo in Florida. He's pissed off about the OPEC oil conspiracy and the conspiracy of gas station owners to raise prices. He doesn't like foreigners and he doesn't like his neighbors (not that he has many); when they finally die they just leave their junk all over the yard. He doesn't like that. He doesn't like the look of the sky right now, either, overcast, a kind of jaundice color. He hates that. And that stand of spruce trees behind the house turning black in the dusk . . . . The way it gets dark earlier every day. He doesn't like that.

Table of Contents

ONE
Story	11	(1)
The Telephone	12	(1)
Tumbling Tumbleweeds	13	(1)
Coronado	14	(1)
Mudhole	15	(1)
Sunflowers	16	(1)
A Miracle	17	(1)
The Preacher	18	(1)
A Hill of Beans	19	(1)
Cripple Creek	20	(1)
High Finance	21	(1)
Cimarron	22	(1)
Radio	23	(4)
TWO
Wind in the Trees	27	(1)
Pilgrimages	28	(1)
Your Ship	29	(1)
Apparition	30	(1)
Jazz Poem	31	(1)
Bad Place	32	(1)
May	33	(1)
The Prose Poem	34	(1)
As the Light Turns Green	35	(1)
Florida	36	(1)
Aqui	37	(1)
Ceremony	38	(1)
River Gorge	39	(1)
Picnic on the Shore	40	(3)
THREE
Duluth	43	(1)
Change	44	(1)
Iron	45	(1)
Northern Light	46	(1)
Fire Danger	47	(1)
Late October Above Lake Superior	48	(1)
Heaven	49	(1)
Pioneer Farm	50	(1)
Mailboxes	51	(1)
The Loon	52	(1)
Sunday Morning	53	(1)
Hockey	54	(1)
Our New House	55	(1)
Rock Collecting	56	(3)
FOUR
Back Home	59	(1)
Painting and Writing	60	(1)
Thunderstorm Warning	61	(1)
Berry Picking	62	(1)
The Bear's Money	63	(1)
Hey Diddle Diddle	64	(1)
Blue, Blue Day	65	(1)
Three Dogs	66	(2)
Old Man Winter	68	(1)
Conjurer	69	(1)
Jackstraw	70	(1)
Somersault	71	(1)
Flight	72	(1)
The Name	73