Poem of the week: Snow by Vidyan Ravinthiran

This fine, metaphysical work is as much a love poem as a love letter to that flaky white stuff

Carol Rumens

Monday 22 September 2014   theguardian.com

'A miracle of whiteness on the pane' … a couple embrace in this image from the 1970s. Photograph: Dennis Hallinan/Jupiter Images

I like the way this week’s poem begins by arguing – not noisily, but with quietly casual insistence. “Snow” by Vidyan Ravinthiran, from his debut collection, Grun-tu-Molani, is a voyage around a subject that has brought out the best in a number of poets (not least Louis MacNeice). It might be in danger of melting under the heat of massed footfall. But Ravinthiran makes his own good snow: deep and crisp and surprising.

I’m tempted to say the poem is not really about snow. It’s an epistle or an epithalamium, a meditation on love and marriage, on the “dark alleys” of life and the illuminating flights. For Ravinthiran as for MacNeice, snow generates incorrigible plurality.
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