Poem of the week: Snow by Vidyan Ravinthiran

This fine, metaphysical work is as much a love poem as a love letter to that flaky white stuff

I like the way this weeks poem begins by arguing not noisily, but with quietly casual insistence. Snow by Vidyan Ravinthiran, from his debut collection, Grun-tu-Molani, is a voyage around a subject that has brought out the best in a number of poets (not least Louis MacNeice). It might be in danger of melting under the heat of massed footfall. But Ravinthiran makes his own good snow: deep and crisp and surprising.

Im tempted to say the poem is not really about snow. Its an epistle or an epithalamium, a meditation on love and marriage, on the dark alleys of life and the illuminating flights. For Ravinthiran as for MacNeice, snow generates incorrigible plurality.

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