Winter Sharp with Apples by Annette Sisson
Terrapin Books, 2024
Annette Sisson’s third volume of poems, “Winter Sharp with Apples,” gifts us with lyrical free verse poems that connect family and nature. In “Memo to a Fledgling,” Sisson writes “Examine each seed before piping it down // the black gullet of your dreams.” In “Muscle Memory” she demonstrates her penchant for unique similes, “We lug our stunted childhoods / like rusted spikes.”
Many poems are narrative and refer to personal experiences. In the poem, “After a Long Indiana Winter, 1964,” Sisson tells of planting seeds for a flower garden with her mother. They find and gently bury a small dead goldfinch that had been “tangled in spurge and bindweed.” The poem calls to mind another poem, “Turf,” in the collection, in which Sisson’s daughter rescues and frees a Praying Mantis. Both poems amplify and demonstrate how reverence for life is passed down generations, nurturing seeds of care.
Poems about Sisson’s parents will resonate with readers who deal with aging relatives. One poem tells of her elderly father’s frustration at losing vision from glaucoma. Another recalls her mother’s bouts with cancer and later death. The poignant poem, “Her Offering,” presents a painful garden metaphor, “among chiseled // rinds, spilled seeds, / the raw viscera of loss,” skins splitting before cantaloupe in the front yard have ripened. Then comes an unexpected narrative as we read that despite being on “the withering vine of her illness,” the mother “fashioned him a sequel.” Imagine this scene:
My mother compiled a list
of marriage partners for my father.
For after she passed. My parentsrecited the litany of candidates
over and over, revising,
parsing pros and cons
until my mother paused,
too frail to carry on.
What of the apple woman in “Caney Fork?” The language is stately as we ponder the poem from which this collection is titled:
Distance and time, a heron’s flight –
its absence, perhaps its return. I want
to glide across that stretch of miles
back to the grizzled woman sorting
fruit, to catch her rusty voice,
see her wave us off again,
the sleeves of her blowsy jacket fanning
wind, a winter sharp with apples.
Again connecting nature and humans, the poem “Bodhi” conveys how “blue jays learn, // jigger latches, pass / down their tricks to the young.” This poet honors those who populate her life: her children, husband, parents, new grandchild, and college students. In “Adagio,” Sisson notes “small consolations, like / my students’ lilac eyes, / flicker of questions, like butterflies.”
The final poem, “Woolsthorpe Manor,” has the poet visiting Isaac Newton’s family home in England. She observes the apple tree that inspired Newton’s theory of gravity and contemplates the world as “new grafts / from Einstein’s branch divide / into strings, quarks, loops of gravity.” These poems value grafted growth from mature stock as well as from planted seeds both in nature and metaphorically in families. The beautiful concluding words in this collection celebrate life, “the tang of desire, of apple.”
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Mary Ellen Talley’s poetry appears in journals such as Willawaw, Deep Wild, and Anti-Heroin Chic. Her book reviews appear in journals such as Asheville Poetry Review, Crab Creek Review, and Sugar House Review. Her third chapbook, Infusion, is available for download from Red Wolf Editions.