Variation on a Landscape | After Hockney's Winter Tunnel

← v7n2, Fall 2008

after David Hockney’s Winter Tunnel With Snow, March

The sky drains beyond the dark plinths

of Holderness, fevers at the ridge, at the pasture’s

metal lip. Branches harden, arc and vault

above the freezing track.

Follow this tunnel. Follow its strict avenue of prayer.

Though the earth locks, turns blind

in its chapping bed. Though the land’s white eye

fastens in its lid of ice.

art nature place

Adam Chiles

Adam Chiles’s first collection of poems, Evening Land, has just been released in the UK by Cinnamon Press. His work has been anthologized in Best New Poets 2007 (Samovar) and Best New Poets 2006 (University of Virginia Press), and has appeared in such journals as Barrow Street , Beloit Poetry Journal , Cimarron Review , Gulf Coast , Indiana Review, and Painted Bride Quarterly . He is the recipient of scholarships and grants from the Banff School of Fine Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Canada Council, and the Gilman School in Baltimore, where he was the 2003–2004 Reginald S. Tickner Writing Fellow. Adam currently lives just outside of Washington, DC, and teaches English and creative writing at Northern Virginia Community College.