The Snow's Music: Poems

by Floyd Skloot

The Snow’s Music continues award-winning poet Floyd Skloot’s lyrical and narrative explorations of memory, love, loss, and artistic expression. At once musical and precise, formal and fluid, Skloot’s poems balance inner and outer vision, past and present experience, meditation and observation, humor and sadness. Skloot explores human resilience in the face of sudden change and radical shifts of perception that define creative endeavor when the world refuses to cohere. Whether the author is recalling lessons learned as a young actor in the role of a Shakespearean clown, thinking about the painter Georges Braque reassembling himself after wartime head injuries, or imagining his volatile parents reunited in the afterlife following his mother’s death at age ninety-six, Skloot’s accessible poems move and delight, creating his most emotional and engaging work yet.

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2008

About the author

Floyd was born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1947, and moved to Long Beach, NY, ten years later. He graduated from Franklin & Marshall College with a B.A. in English, and completed an M.A. in English at Southern Illinois University, where he studied with the Irish poet Thomas Kinsella. From 1972 until becoming disabled by viral-borne brain damage in 1988, Floyd worked in the field of public policy in Illinois, Washington, and Oregon. He began publishing poetry in 1970, fiction in 1975, and essays in 1990. His work has appeared in many major literary journals in the US and abroad. His seventeen books have won wide acclaim and numerous awards, and are included in many high school and college curricula. In May, 2006 he received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Franklin & Marshall College.


An Oregonian since 1984, Floyd moved from Portland to rural Amity when he married Beverly Hallberg in 1993. They lived in a cedar yurt in the middle of twenty hilly acres of woods for 13 years before moving back to Portland.


Floyd's daughter, the nonfiction writer Rebecca Skloot, lives in Memphis, TN, where she teaches creative writing at the University of Memphis and works as a freelance writer. Her book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, was published by Crown Books in February, 2010 and became an immediate NY Times and Indie Bound bestseller. Her work has been included in the Best Creative Nonfiction, Best Food Writing and Women’s Best Friend anthologies as well as appearing regularly in the New York Times Magazine, Popular Science, O: Oprah’s Magazine and elsewhere. Her boyfriend, writer and actor David Prete, author of Say That to My Face (Norton, 2003), recently completed his second book of fiction and teaches writers how to improve their public reading skills. Floyd's stepson, Matthew Coale, lives with his wife and two children in Vancouver, Washington.


Floyd's current projects include new poems and essays that are slowly shaping into a new book.

Reviews

[Bjorn Sorensen · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best in different genres elicit common responses from readers. Good mysteries are described as "page turners", good fiction makes people stay up all hours and read. Good poetry makes one slow down, savor the moment, read the poem over, and think about how it was crafted and what it said.

I took my time with Floyd Skloot's newest, "The Snow's Music". A master of cadence, inner/end rhyme, sentence breaks and also a person who has experienced deep pain and loss, Skloot writes to cherish the moment and honor the senses.

Separated into four distinct sections, "The Snow's Music" uses details from Skloot's life, landscapes large and small and mini biographies of famous artists as backdrops. One of the many poems that got repeated readings, "Paul Signac at Castellane, 1902":


In late afternoon heat, Signac takes
the curves slowly, coasting when he can,
feet at rest on the pedals. Florid light
turns the cliff rosy as he swerves to a stop
where the Verdon at last comes into sight.

It is pure emerald, just as he remembers.
The ancient bridge shimmers in the river's
reflection. But there is no time for memory.
No time even to think. Purple shadows
stain the cliff's throat, lap at the bank,
and he needs to capture the broken light
that brought him to a halt before it vanishes.

Signac drops his pack, scrabbles inside
for his pad and paint tray. He rushes past two
washerwomen, bends to fill his tin cup
at the riverbank, and touches by chance
the very place where green becomes blue.

No matter how quickly he moves, time
moves faster. Suddenly he feels the river
growing still, then turning back on itself.
He has a vision of the cliff crumbling
in ebony chunks. There are no people,
no scents, no sounds. He falls to his knees,
knowing the dark future when he sees it.
It all happened so fast. Behind him,
the wheels of his bicycle continue to spin.


Turning 60 has given Skloot an even greater appreciation for the constant parts of his life - his marriage, the power of nature plentiful and nature remaining, the pockets of community still flourishing under the monotony of globalization, memory that sustains no matter how positive or painful.

Skloot is earnest and incredibly humane, his writing vivid in its well-chosen details.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lovely. Full of wisdom and interesting observations. A great Portland poet!