Snowlines by Rebecca Gethin

Recently I took an armchair trip to the Italian Alps  thanks to Snowlines , Rebecca Gethin’s latest book of poetry. The poems are inspired by the unexpected world she discovered in these mountains.

Her publisher Maytree Press gives a good background —

Snowlines by Rebecca Gethin

Mountains are exhilarating, but by their nature, immense and dangerous. Hikers can get lost in blizzards. The weather is unpredictable. There are steep cliffs, rock slides and snowfields. Gethin’s poems are a wonderful mix of narrative and descriptions of what she finds on her treks.

Visually,  the poems are full of shadows –and the contrast between light and dark which occurs in the mountains.  A wonderful word “chiaroscuro ” is used to describe a snake who is half hidden in shade.

Vipers are poisonous and another mountain danger! A beautifully written encounter with the reptile made me gasp!

a  pattern skin pulses, a spine

tightens, a script of venom flexes

inches from my foot

There is so much life and a surprising variety. Many insects – butterflies, fireflies, bees. Fish, tadpoles. Forests in the foothills. A hazel tree growing out of a crevice. Shepherds and their sheep. Wild chamoix. And maybe, just maybe, a wolf. Her descriptions are filmic, full of action verbs with dramatic contrasts of scale:

A herd of chamoix leaped

across islands of ice on a lake

A hairy caterpillar

lay comatose on a drift.

The smallest melt-hole

released a crocus.

Gethin describes people she meets and the connections she makes with those who still live there. She discovers stories from the past. Some are about family and relatives!

Eduardo

I first met him while he was having a slash
in the bushes below the church.

He took my hand and I felt friendship
clasped by its knobbly geography.

He tended his bees in in hollow tree trunks
and let them walk across his bare hands.

He gave us a big jar of honey, one of his last
which we haven’t yet opened. It’s on a shelf.

He knew my father and his father. He hooshed
a breath and said it was risky back then.

He could tell me the names of those who built
the terraces on the slopes below us

where they grew potatoes and beans to survive.
He’d known the lads who tended goats and sheep

on high pastures, alone all day. On moonless nights
they hung unto a goat to guide them home.

During the war, his mother had buried her saucepans
which Mussolini demanded for weapons

while her brothers knew caves to hide from the enemy.
He said my bi-lingual father was too dangerous to know.

There’s so much history. In the last haunting poem, the future feels uncertain.

In an empty village a water spout arcs

into a trough where someone once chiselled

a sun and half moon above a figure

with stick arms, quizzical eyes

The very final image is of apples, unpicked, that lie scattered and shrivelled under a tree.

Snowlines reads and feels like a pilgrimage, a quest and a memoir  — the poet pays homage to a place and the inhabitants. I enjoyed very much this book by Rebecca Gethin. Order it from Maytree Press