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Liliane Welch opens Unlearning Ice with contemplations on everyday objects, ascribing to them an awareness of their essential roles in our lives. She allows commonplaces to reveal the moment of their being, their subtle consequence. In "Entering the House," the reader is enjoined to recognize the kind of company we keep with our domestic environment. But as we are often reminded, this poet has entered not just a new house, but a new homeland. "What of the outsider," she asks, "who carries questions / and secret voices inside?" ("Congregation")

"Photo Journeys" proposes that the silent land of New Brunswick photographer Thaddeus Holownia "hungers for language." In her notes Welch confides that many of the poems in the first half of Unlearning Ice "are part of an ongoing dialogue" with the images captured by Holownia. She fastens to "these empty Maritimes" her own art, supplanting earlier testaments of humankind. "August dusk awash" invokes the spirit of Hesiod, the Greek mythologist, to assist in the writing of "the old stories."

A second theme that pervades this volume is the poet's recognition of the passage of life. In "Around Thanksgiving" a browning landscape, swift wolves and angry clouds evoke the contemplation of approaching death, although that end is not yet in sight. She maintains her liveliness most emphatically in the following poem, "October twentieth, my life." She faces the sun.

"At sixty-two" she expresses a desire to relive her life as a musician or a sculptor, but not "as a scholar, mending fences on low ground," a depressing image for her present academic calling. Of course, if she hadn't been a scholar we would have missed her allusions to Hesiod, and Baudelaire, and Caravaggio.

"Radiant Hush," the second division of the book, takes the reader into the cover painting by Alex Colville, and on into the works and lives of other artists as well - Rodin, for example, in "When we glimpse them, delight." The subject, by that sculptor, is an unfinished work, "The Eternal Idol," which, for a better appreciation of the poem, may be seen on the Internet at .

Welch's first interpretation of the female figure, "leaning back in reverie, to accept his kiss," conforms to Rodin's original title of the work, The Host. But the "torso-language" creates an impression of the male's dependence and worship. Furthermore, his figure is incomplete, "shouldering out of marble" as Welch suggests, and leaving, as does the poem, the nature of consummated love an unanswered question: Is love "a mountain's radiance, stirring in an eternal idol's hands?" In a later poem ("Saint Augustine") Welch affirms that "mountains first framed human longing."

A question arises of the legitimacy of a poem inspired by an obscure work of art, or as we shall see later in this collection, an obscure artist. A poet's answer is that a subject, however uncelebrated or tenebrous, may demand that a poem be written. Publishing for others to read is an after-thought. The essential feature of such a poem is that it shall contain a universal truth, or at least a universal question - in this case concerning the nature of love.

When we reach the poem "Thirst" we are into the midwinter of the volume's ostensible time-line, and Welch, longing for her other world, emerges as a mistress of metonymy: "We sip warm hillsides, lavender smells, the delight of talk...." European wine drunk in New Brunswick is a figure for trans-Atlantic landscapes, smells, conversations and old friends, "their taste leaving us thirsty once more." It seems we must guard our distance, for a sip of great wine leaves us to bear the aftertaste.

Part 3, "Unlocked Melody," begins with poems about loss and death, in which the event is sadder for those who remain behind than for the deceased, who "embrace the journey" ("Preludes") or linger nearby to "read our thoughts" ("They"). These thoughts are presented at the end of this section. Ice imagery becomes depressingly and deliberately more frequent. Canadians have "learned" ice, and we must unlearn it for an esthetic experience. Poetry is a way toward this unlearning, a synthesis of music and imagery.

Welch's Canada is much as Voltaire described it, "quelques arpents de neige." Her emancipation (in "Thoughts") resembles a personal Götterdämmerung. She joins her Valkyrian twilight visitors, and we find her back in Europe for the summer (part 4).

Giovanni Segantini was an Italian painter who lived 1858-1899. See for the subject of "At the Segantini Museum in St. Moritz." "Quick Flights" pertains to Cézanne's "Madame Cézanne au fauteuil jaune," to be found at <http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/cezanne/portraits/mme/cezanne.mme-yellowchair.jpg>. Caravaggio's "Medusa" (p. 79) may be seen at .

Whether or not the reader is prepared to open those sites for the visual dimension, the three poems might be placed on their own as a tryptich on the apotheosis of women through submission - to necessity, to matrimony and to misogyny. Welch attended "Caravaggio - the Light in Lombard Painting," an exhibition at the Carrara Academy in Bergamo, Italy, in the early summer of 2000. She empathizes with Caravaggio's women, Judith, Ursula, Salome, who "open a hunger tempered by composure, bent heads," and particularly Medusa, who was forced to realize the failure of her petrifying glance.

Can every new poet draw nourishment from any painter's art? "How jolting it was not be a saint," says Welch, in shock at being ineligible, as an unbeliever, to profit from the "book of hours," the church interior that Ruskin called the poor man's Bible. She also understands the artist's anguish, whether poet or painter. Vincent van Gogh once wrote from the painter's point of view, to his brother Theo, "Poetry is more formidable than painting." I think Welch knows what he meant by "formidable," in "Painter at Home." The atelier is "the place for bending thought in pilgrimage to un-named things."

Unlearning Ice ends far from the winters of the Trantramar. It is July near the Swiss-Italian border, half-way between Saint Moritz and Lake Como. Part III of "In the Val Bregaglia" alludes to Rainer Maria Rilke's self-composed epitaph: "Rose, O pure contradiction, desire to be no one's sleep beneath so many lids." While in Paris, Rilke developed a lyricism influenced by the visual arts. Welch is evidently Rilke's disciple in this regard.

She reflects at last on a youth lost but not regretted, and an auspicious future. We may anticipate from Liliane Welch a further triumph of art over winter.