When Snow Walks In

A collection of poetry celebrates the awe of everyday moments.

Candland’s book takes quotidian moments and turns them into poetry, from enjoying the blissful hours of quiet before daybreak to knitting with an older neighbor and running an errand in the days when potato chips cost a mere 15 cents. The author recalls a mother and daughter selling candy bars on the subway and how an aunt embroidered her whole life. Candland composes poems honoring legends like Green Man and Lady Godiva. In a piece about Paris, she describes wandering around the City of Light: “Over-washed chalcedony sky, / canaries yellow in tender cages / under market tents, / trade songs with one another.” She explores “vermilion rooms” in Edinburgh’s National Gallery and admires Botticelli’s Simonetta Vespucci, asking the subject, “Are the whispers true that you were in love?” “Summer’s Lament” depicts a mother’s ennui, which sends the family to the beach to drink iced tea from a thermos and grill hot dogs over “tired ashes.” Candland is enamored with the tiniest of details, but she also insists: “Perfection is numbing…it has to be raspy / and needling / and oxidizing / or else how can I feel.” The poet’s imagery is vibrant and engaging. Getting up early for a yoga class, she notes how the “shadows hug buildings” and “cars in opposite lane / form a long searchlight.” There are beautiful bits of wisdom buried in these poems, as when she writes “I wanted to experience life but not be / hurt by it” in “Sand Dunes.” Her questions are universal, as when she visits a kiva and asks: “If I listened hard enough / would the songs handed down by my ancestors / be sung to me.” But some poems hinge on pure description and lack insights. These paint undeniably lovely and memorable scenes from the author’s life, but why does she feel compelled to share them? Readers will long for a few more aha moments.

Evocative poems that feel familiar but not mundane.

- Kirkus Reviews

"Just sitting there. Looking forward to a murky pancake and syrup that stares back from a small stainless pitcher - when Snow walks in."

Like the title poem in this short and elegant collection, the other pieces also describe the extraordinary amidst everyday scenes and in understandable prose and sparkling details. Simple things like utensils, road signs, trinkets at a thrift sale, and foods convey the feelings surrounding memories. Compassion and empathy are immediate responses to such straightforward expressions of emotion. Like Snow, the tantalizing newcomer to the scene in the title poem, the poems invite the reader into an elevated experience of humanity through captured impressions. 

The poems take place in California and Europe. Nearly all are a single page in length, with ample space between the lines for absorption and reflection. The book's pacing is measured and relaxed, a welcome break from busyness. Scenes of sand dunes and gardens are like a vacation without going anywhere. The muse is a frequent character connecting the narrator across time and space to ancient works of art and to her own work as a writer and artist.

Candland imagines watching figures in paintings coming to life, as in "Lady Godiva." Snow is another instance, inspiring as well as mystifying her secret admirer and observer. Recollections from childhood show the narrator developing keen powers of observation. In "Dad's Typewriter," Candland remembers playing with the tool, while it also becomes a loaded symbol for the power of art later in life. Simplicity betrays life's complexities in Candland's crystalline prose, as innocent girlhood moments are looked back on with adult eyes. The poems push boundaries by putting two seemingly unrelated events side by side. For example, in "Lodestone," a mugging is juxtaposed with marveling at a gem. These parallels open the reader up to wonder and marvel, with fantastical elements embedded in daily life.

- The US Review of Books

Christine Candland describes her evocative poetry collection as “whimsical and lighthearted verses based on real-life experiences, art, and travel.” Indeed, the volume offers enjoyable glimpses of people, places, and objects significant to the poet-speaker’s life.

Candland’s free-verse, narrative work has a crisp, clean style that relies on concrete nouns and sensory details. Readers are easily drawn into scenes she creates, able to picture each moment. She resists generalizations, excelling at employing specific details to make memorable images. For example, in “Celery,” she writes: “When Mom and Dad/ talked about his salary/ I thought they meant celery// and I dreamed of the stalks/ being traded for dollars and// wondered if they weighed the celery whole/ or just counted the stalks one by one.”

Readers meet interesting characters, including “The Ladies in the Neighborhood” and the title character “Snow,” a mysterious woman observed in a diner: “Long legs, suede brown coat, black straight/ skirt with kick pleat…” Candland also brings works of visual art alive: “Trapped in the Duomo by day/ Delphi and the rest of the Sibyls/ (composed of white marble)/ have plenty to say about/ salvation and resurrection”

As a collection of light verse, this volume is superlative. Still, one often wishes the poet would go deeper. The work lacks a greater thread of tension or gravitas, a deeper reckoning on the part of the poet-speaker to balance the light verse. Some of the poems, like “Weight,” which promise close inspection of a social issue such as body image, shy away from a thorough exploration of the subject: “Suppose she could pass on the/ cookie that winks and/ choose the cottage cheese instead/ and never lusted for size zeros.” The poem concludes too easily with “If only…” 

Candland’s debut collection presents a world readers will thoroughly enjoy entering. To reach a wider audience of devoted poetry readers, she needs only build upon what’s here by grappling more tenaciously with her place in that world.

- BlueInk Review

The accessible poetry collection When Snow Walks In includes entries that are both literary and personal. 

Christine Candland’s powerful poetry collection When Snow Walks In is optimistic, even about unpleasant experiences. 

Often celebrating the everyday, these blank verse poems are concise, autobiographical, and rife with lingering emotions. Although they are free from formal poetic constraints, like rhyming, syllable counts, and stanza structures, many of them do draw on poetic devices, as with “My Dad’s Typewriter,” wherein metonymy is used to substitute an Underwood typewriter for the speaker’s father, and which develops its theme—the relationship between the father and his daughter—in a powerful way. 

In other poems, end rhymes and enjambment are used, often together, to draw attention to a specific emotion, as in “Mom’s Photo”:

Mother stares at me,
she has seen into the future
and knows I will
leave her.

The connection of “future” and “her,” along with the poem’s dramatic line breaks, results in a melody that builds suspense within the stanza. Each additional line is unexpected, but strong in its emotions: though the regret and dread that comes from the speaker’s decision to leave her mother is not pronounced, it is implied.

Many of the poems are meditative and ekphratic, translating snapshots into words with ease. “When Snow Walks In” is explicit in describing feeling taken aback by a woman who enters a restaurant; it outlines the process of capturing her essence in a drawing. Poems including “Desert Paint,” “Faces,” and “Chasing the Unicorn” also translate works of art into poetic lines.

While most of the entries tell complete stories, a few, including “Before Daybreak,” concentrate on single moments instead, relying on the beauty of language to fill in narrative gaps. This lyric impulse leads to the entries’ moods, characters, and settings being conveyed with ease, as in “Before Daybreak”:

Somewhere between dawn and mischief
after turning on the heat
a roar of endless apologies
sinks down into the carpet.

Even before its focus is named, it is made clear that the subject is a feline arriving home just after a day of exploration. But some of the poems are impeded by cases of redundancy, as in “My Dad’s Typewriter,” wherein a line about the daughter’s thoughts (”Don’t touch it, interrupts my thoughts”) includes an unnecessary explanatory clause.

Many poems in the collection focus on trips to Europe. In these travel poems, local histories are embedded into the language of the poems, evoking the experience of visiting. In “The Sibyls of Siena,” the Homeric language of Mt. Olympus is juxtaposed with a scene of mothers and daughters in the Duomo, capturing a between space in which reverence for history meets with the distractions of tourism.

The collection is topically expansive, moving from contemplating a lifetime spent in domesticity to the excitement of a joy ride. Each poem is strong on its own, if overarching unity is missing.

The accessible poetry collection When Snow Walks In includes entries that are both literary and personal.

- Foreword Reviews