The snow man in winter

The Guardian poem of the week is Martha Kapos' "A Mind of Winter," selected from her most recent collection, Supreme Being. Kapos channels the spirit of Wallace Stevens through her chilly verse, suggests Carol Rumens, by allowing him to seep into her "imaginative philosophy."

"A Mind of Winter" looks solid, with its firmly-packed six- or five-line stanzas, but it's mysteriously hard to pin down. At first, it seems to have a clear agenda. The title comes from the opening line of Wallace Stevens's almost Zen-like ars poetica, "The Snow Man" ("One must have a mind of winter/ To regard the frost and the boughs/ Of the pine-trees crusted with snow …"), and the epigraph is dedicatory: "For Wallace Stevens in March." Then things get difficult.....

Rumens approves of the poem's mysterious yet beautiful uncertainty. But what to make of its barren winter? Is it nothingness, or a clean slate for the soul?

No symbol in the poem, no metamorphosis, is water-tight or conclusive. The "one white quiet thing" suggests finality, but then, seemingly, life continues, the page of the book the protagonist holds containing an "icy scene" described as "pitiless and horizontal". Is this death, a graveyard, or simply winter and the wintriness of the mind that gives itself up to seeing with such selfless clarity?