A Vast, Blinding Cold

I love the specific focus on the type of “cold” that feels prevalent throughout Meg Matich’s manuscript. This gave all the poems a nice feeling of continuity while reading them. Like many other people have already expressed, Matich’s cold theme conjured up a variety of images and colors in my mind. Specifically, a very blinding, bright, icy white feeling. Reading the poems felt a lot like standing in a wide-open field on a particularly sunny winter day. I felt very chilled and squinty from the vast, white image of the field of snow and the bright imaginary sunshine—almost dazed while trying to absorb all the detail in the poems around me. As such, I’ve created a compilation of colors and images to illustrate the way I think of Matich’s poems.

Overall, when I imagine the bright white images in Matich’s poems, I can almost physically feel the cold that she is speaking of. Through this, Matich eloquently evokes a response from her readers, which further adds to the vivid richness of her writing. It’ll be exciting to see how the final publication develops from the individual thoughts and responses of all the class members involved with the project.