Winter Recipes from the Collective: Poems

There are books that you take on a stroll, and there are books that are the stroll. Winter Recipes from the Collective by Louise Gluck is a careful meandering in a field bathed in soft sunlight. Poems ranging from journeys to love, stories to holidays, make this collection an entire lifetime tightly woven into fifteen poems.

It opens similar to a children’s tale, in the same vein as imagery from the Brothers Grimm, portraying life lived with pauses and crossing bridges. The elderly are revered, as are the wisdom of nature and youth. The fragility and beauty of both life and death are intertwined and inextricable. Even on the somber topic of death is there a nod of understanding, that death is not the absence of love, especially with memory to uphold it.

With these life lessons, above all, Gluck is guiding her reader in how to be: to be their own person and to find the bravery to be in front of others. Life is transient, and it ebbs and flows. But in the same way that any one thing can be lost, it can always be found again.