The Snow Watcher
Published on 26. August 1999
Book
Paperback/Softback
112 pages
978-1-85224-502-3 (ISBN)
Description
'In the last ten years Chase Twichell has published three very different and very strong books. The ?rst, Perdido, was about desire and sexuality and dreams. The second, The Ghost of Eden, came as a surprise - an angry, clear-headed book about the destruction of the earth - as if she'd shaken off dreams and desire and taken a hard look at how things were. The newest book, The Snow Watcher, is a surprise again...Reading the poems in The Snow Watcher is like breathing cold air. Organised as a kind of narrative of her apprenticeship in Zen meditation, they are full of sharp observation, both of the world and herself, unsentimental poems with a sinewy intellectual toughness, and, as the book progresses, they open out into a stark, sometimes bewildered clarity.'- Robert Hass, Washington Post
Reviews / Votes
Chase Twichell's The Snow Watcher is raw, fresh, and lucidly harsh. These poems often enter a not quite familiar terrain, taking us on an admirable but not quite comfortable journey into ourselves. -- Jim HarrisonMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
Tyne and Wear
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 138 mm
Weight
180 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-85224-502-3 (9781852245023)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Chase Twichell was born in 1950 in New Haven, Connecticut, and educated at Trinity College (Hartford) and the University of Iowa. She lives in the Keene Valley in the Adirondacks, where she spent many summers and vacations during her childhood and where her father's family had gone for many generations. The two greatest influences on her life and work have been this early intimacy with wilderness followed by her years as a Zen Buddhist student of John Daido Loori at Zen Mountain Monastery in the Catskills. Her poetry books include Northern Spy (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981), The Odds (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1986), Perdido (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, USA, 1991; Faber & Faber, UK, 1992, Poetry Book Society Choice), The Ghost of Eden (Ontario Review Press, USA, 1995; Faber & Faber, UK, 1996, Poetry Book Society Recommendation), The Snow Watcher (Ontario Review Press, USA, 1998; Bloodaxe Books, UK, 1999); Dog Language (Copper Canyon Press, USA, 2005; Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2006, Poetry Book Society Recommendation); and Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been: New & Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, USA, 2010; Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2010). The Lover of God (by Rabindranath Tagore, co-translated with Tony K. Stewart) was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2003. She also co-edited The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises from Poets Who Teach with Robin Behn (HarperCollins, 1992). She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Artists Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1997 she won the Alice Fay DiCastagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America for The Snow Watcher. She received a Smart Family Foundation Award in 2004. From 1976 to 1984 she worked at Pennyroyal Press, and from 1986 to 1988 she co-edited the Alabama Poetry Series, published by University of Alabama Press. After teaching for many years (at Hampshire College, the University of Alabama, Goddard College, Warren Wilson College, and Princeton University), she resigned in 1999 to start Ausable Press, a non-profit, independent literary press that she operated until it was acquired by Copper Canyon Press in 2009.