Tipton Poetry Journal – Summer 2021 Review: Snow in New York by Matthew Brennan
Reviewed by Dan Carpenter
Title: Snow in New York Author: Matthew Brennan Year: May, 2021 Publisher: Lamar University Literary Press
The title work of Matthew Brennan’s sixth book of poetry serves as a handy sampler of preoccupations that have distinguished his work for more than four decades: storytelling, graphic description, blindsiding metaphor, personification of nature, a keen (if nomadic) sense of place and a gallant shouldering of tristesse marked foremost by family lamentation. Brennan’s place these days is Columbus, Ohio; but he spent 32 years teaching at Indiana State University, and that western Indiana milieu receives its due among the 102 entries in Snow in New York: New and Selected Poems. So do a spate of other stops revisited in a collection that represents Brennan’s life from early childhood onward – San Francisco, St. Louis, Minneapolis, England and the ancestral Ireland among them. “Snow in New York,” the next-to-last of the 21 new poems, is one of several poignant glimpses into Brennan’s brother’s struggle with the cancer that took his young life. It’s winter, the poet has come to the big city to accompany the patient across town to treatment, and shares the frustration of finding the car by morning encased in ice “like a great glacier / never thawed.” . . . You struck and clawed and quarreled with the cold, stony block, a sculptor scorned by his hard-hearted muse . . .
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