Puckerbrush Press

Dead of Winter, poems by Michael McMahon, continues the distinctive voice of McMahon's first collection, A Day's Work, published by Puckerbrush Press in 1976. It is a New England voice seemingly diffident but in reality memorable in its tenaciousness. New England is once again the scene, and winter the season, New England's quintessential season. They are poems in black and white, like trees in a snowy landscape.

A Place in the Choir

After old songs, the voices unwoven

like the fringe of a shawl

the snow

at the edge of the woods on the way home

is a sound,

a hush

that means the trees have turned inward

the way men do after forty years

of mornings

when they wake to a silence

rising like well water

three days after a rain,

or in a cold bedroom, the silence

of people

who believe the grave will speak.