The World Before Snow

Through blizzards, paintings and astrophysics Tim Liardet’s The World Before Snow challenges and rewards the reader, writes John Field

Early morning’s untrodden snow is inviting because you are called, in your own small way, to be an intrepid explorer – to chart the uncharted. Reading contemporary poetry offers this excitement; you can hear your soles crunching the first footsteps into the landscape. Tim Liardet’s The World Before Snow poses questions and sets challenges. Its point of embarkation is a love affair in blizzard-bound Boston and, as the reader, you will reach the end of this collection warmed by your exertions.

We’re told how a flight of grackles and cowbirds

dropped out of the sky in Baton Rouge, thudded

everywhere on the ground, blossomed into gardenias

Sanctus. I could not tell exactly who or what you were,

were not. I thought you might have been the I, I, I, of the seabird.

you belonged to someone else and so did I.

We were caught, it seemed in the star’s drag-field

which meant the room very slowly started to rotate.

John Donne’s ‘The Sun Rising’ playfully imagines the bed as the centre of the universe, as he attempts to dismiss the morning sun, asking it to go and shine somewhere else. Liardet’s is a post-Einsteinian take on this theme, where bodies and attraction are subject to the laws of physics and where, in the heat of passion, even time can stop.

                              The ghost goes through its work-out.

For its every long pull on the oar—from shin bone to waist—

You have to pull five or more to keep up with the pace.