trees stand in their bones
asleep in the creak of wind
with snow on its mind.
Come spring they'll need reminding
how to weep, bleed, bud, grow rings
for cruck, or crib, or cross,
to break again in leaf.
The heartwood's stone, grief
of sap-tears frozen in at the root.
While trees are dreaming green,
ice unfurls its foliage
on gutter, gate and hedge,
ghost-beauty cold as snow,
like the first forest, long ago.
Snow isn't just on the mind of Mother Nature here, she's making it manifest. The freezing rain that hit the leaves in the backyard with its staccato rhythms when I first awoke has now been transformed into an ongoing dusting of snow that's sugaring the ivy and settled in the crook of the cherry tree next door. It's a perfect day to cuddle up with a good book and a pot of tea and while I'm eager to brew a pot of one of the new brews I got for Christmas and settle in with a cozy mystery, I have work to do so that will have to wait till later this afternoon.
In the meantime, the weather got me to thinking about my winter reading list. I didn't fare so well with my summer reading list but that hasn't stopped me from developing a winter one. Hopefully giving up my Netflix subscription will mean I'll actually get some, if not all, of these books read before the spring equinox rolls around.
So here's what I'll be reading in the upcoming weeks . . . .
Ice by Gillian Clarke
This is a slim volume of poetry that I picked up when I was in Wales a few weeks ago in my poetry haul from a bookstore in Bangor. Gillian Clarke is a Welsh poet who may not be that well known to US audiences. I love the idea of a collection of poems that was inspired by the landscape during a particular season, especially when that season is winter. I'll confess I've already read all the poems in this book, many of them more than once, but I'm sure I'll be returning to it as winter deepens. Likewise, Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems and Poems by Mary Oliver on the list.
For straight up non-fiction, I'll be reading Adam Gopnik's Winter: Five Windows on the Season and Bill Streever's Cold: Adventures in the World's Frozen Places. Gopnik's book is actually a series of five, hour long lectures he gave across Canada as part of the Massey Lectures. While Gopnik's work focuses on the season, Streever's book looks at the biology, history and geography of what many most associate with winter-- cold. 
Finally, for fiction I have Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and Pullman's His Dark Material's trilogy on my night stand. I've long been a fan of the movie Doctor Zhivago but have never gotten around to reading the book. Actually I have a lot of Russian novels on my nightstand with the hope we'll get a good snowfall that will leave me housebound long enough to work my way through War and Peace and maybe Anna Karenina in between rounds of shoveling. But given global warming I may have to move further north for that to be a part of my future so Pasternak will likely win out over Tolstoy this winter. I got Pullman's trilogy when I was doing my doctoral studies and would pull it out each December and read the same few chapters then realize I had books for school I needed to read my early January so I'd put it aside and the next year repeat the process. This year I'm finally going to get past the point where Lyra meets Iorek Brynison . . . or else.
So how about you? Do you have any wintry books on your reading list for 2013?
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