The Center for Cold Weather

Sheep Meadow Press, 1989

SUMMER READERS may balk at reading verse by the pool, but, as English Professor Cleopatra Mathis's latest lyrical anthology reminds us, we are all neighbors to the inescapable cold-weather centers of our memory. Mathis painstakingly researches the places in the heart that drive us onward places that, like the enigmatic, fictional Center for Cold Weather halfway between Hanover and Lyme, assess and manage the depths of cold. The voice in "Living Next to the Center for Cold Weather" asks, "what do I know about freezing, about thaws/ of such shade and density that they can take years?" Similarly, Mathis's 33 poems resonate with the familiarity of memory's seasons, the proximity between warmth and desolation in the ongoing life of the heart.

Mathis opensa window tothe places in our heart.

AS Cleopatra Mathis reminds us, we are all neighborsto the inescapable cold-weather centers of our memory.