Green Bodies by Rosemary Winslow

The Word Works, 2007
Review by Julie R. Enszer

Truth-telling is integral to poetry. Putting the truth into language is both a calling and a struggle for poets. In the forty-five poems of Rosemary Winslow’s first collection, Green Bodies, the struggle of language is evident in both form and content. Green Bodies is divided into three sections and although the book is interwoven thematically each section presents and addresses different concerns.

The first fifteen poems are an elegy for the poet’s brother. Winslow writes with great power and sensitivity about this death. In one of the most ambitious poems of the collection, “Walking Quaker Whiteface Road I Meet My Brother,” she engages both the metaphysical questions of grief in lines such as,

Once in my grief
I saw something of my brother appear
The night after the funeral

As I walked the floors of the house.
A place of whiteness, and sensed conveyance—

as well as the philosophical questions of grief when she writes, “What is it to lose a life you never/had time to live?” Winslow’s lyric and narrative impulses sing in this first section even as she introduces the content that will pressure and transform the collection in the second section.