Winter Amnesties

by Elton Glaser

Winter Amnesties is a book of origins and endings, griefs and reconciliations. Each poem addresses the dilemma posed by G. K. Chesterton: “One must somehow find a way of loving the world without trusting it.” The poems revisit the past, assess the present, and stare hard into the future. At middle age, Glaser remembers his youth in Louisiana and settles into the long stretch of his adult years in Ohio; he makes his peace with “the life that allows.” As son, as father, as poet, he looks to his legacy, whatever dim remnant of himself might continue after “all flesh falls back to salt and cinder.”

            

But these are poems of brio and bitter wit, not of self-pity and surrender. They take a jaunty stance towards life and welcome whatever the days may bring, confident that, like crows in the harvest cornfield, we can live on “the shocks and waste of this world” and “wring gold grain from the ruin.”

   

96 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2000

About the author

A longtime resident of Ohio, poet Elton Glaser was born and raised in Louisiana and earned an MFA from the University of California, Irvine.

Glaser’s collections of poetry include Relics (1984); Tropical Depressions (1988), which won the Iowa Poetry Prize; Color Photographs of the Ruins (1992); Winter Amnesties (2000); and Pelican Tracks (2003). His sixth collection, Here and Hereafter (2005), received the Arkansas Poetry Award.

Glaser’s awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and from the Ohio Arts Council. In 1996 he received the Ohioana Poetry Award. He has taught at the University of Akron in Akron, Ohio, and served as editor of the Akron Series in Poetry at the University of Akron Press.

Reviews

[Michael Brockley · Rating 4 out of 5]

WINTER AMNESTIES by Elton Glaser
A Catholic, Southern poet encounters an Ohio winter.