INTRODUCTION

TO ME ice readily suggests imagery. What is imagery? It’s the recurring details in your poems or prose pieces that create unity of tone and atmosphere. Use an image once, then use again and again in various ways. Imagery usually operates metaphorically. You don’t have to create the metaphor – the reader does. An emotionally cold character is not said to be icy. He is shown against a frosted-over window, his face blue. Later in the same piece, perhaps, someone feels an ice pick at their heart, there’s a shivering dog, a cold ham, hungry guests skating to the buffet. We often talk of an image system, which means that a single story or poem will explore a variety of related imagery.

In Gillian Allnutt’s poem, ‘Blackthorn’, a poem I believe to be about the poet’s own soul – the image system details needlework, sewing and weaving. At first the imagery seems to have nothing to do with the poem’s meaning, but works to illuminate it in a most surprising way.

'Blackthorn' by Gillian Allnutt

I like to imagine/ The stars are something other than sewing machines.

I am rooted, remote.

I guard the white embroidered whirlpools/ Of the wind.

Beyond the muted talk of angels there are quick black holes/ Like poems. In my heart

I hear the creak and shuttle of the earth’s old bones,/ The toil and spin.

I am the wake, the needle and the
well/ Of wondering.

In ‘Pretty Ice’, a short story by Mary Robson, the slippery white stuff operates in a more obvious, yet powerful way. The story is about the end of a relationship with a man named Will. The imagery gives us a dangerous feeling of things sliding and skidding away.

The saplings in my little yard were encased in ice. There had been snow all week, and then an ice storm. In the glimmering driveway in front of my house, my mother was peering out of her car… My yard was a frozen pond , and I was careful on the walkway…

Out on the street, she accelerated too quickly and the rear of the car swung left. The tires whined for an instant on the old snow and then caught. ‘This is going to be something,’ my mother said. ‘Will sure picked an awful day to come.’

Ice permeates this story, but it’s not a story about ice. Ice is only used as an apt image system throughout. There’s even a lot of white things mentioned in this story: an ivory Mont Blanc pen; mother’s minty-white hair rinse.

An image system gives depth to your writing. Sometimes it may be impossible to start out with such imagery. But once you discover it (or impose it) you can produce a draft that soaks the work in it. Often it’s interesting to overdo the imagery, then cut it back.