The poems in Wintering Over-to take shelter through, and within, the dark of the year-wrestle with a sacred yearning to embrace the light in darkness. Poems in the book's first half dwell with the interior lives of contemplatives the Arctic north. Others move from vastness to enclosure--a night swim in polar waters, an anchoress preparing for a special visitor, or a New England field teeming with quiet dramas of life and death. Everywhere in-between, the will to carry on, at times with only the smallest illumination, startles these poems into moments of uneasy revelation.