A Poem by Erica McAlpine

Snowdrops

What if this virgin-
coloured cluster
huddled close against
the cold and bluster
were all the hue a spring-time
field could muster?

Accustomed
to such deprivations,
would we crave
the lichen’s grey and white striations,
or knots of black on birches,
like dalmatians,

or stuff that blows
in gales across the rough,
like hail—the pussy
willow’s silver fluff?
Would black-and-whiteness
be enough?

Erica McAlpine’s poems have appeared in the New York Review of Books, the TLS, The Atlantic, The New Statesman, The Spectator, The American Scholar, The Yale Review, Stand, Ambit, and elsewhere. Her first collection, The Country Gambler, was published by Shearsman Books in 2016, and her scholarly book The Poet’s Mistake was chosen by Paul Muldoon as a TLS Book of the Year and won the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize from the British Academy. She is originally from Atlanta, Georgia, but now lives in the UK, where she is an associate professor of English at Oxford University and a fellow of St Edmund Hall.