Wintering Ground
“A mature, accomplished debut. Bailes is one to watch.”
—Edgar Kunz, author of Fixer
Coming
January 2027
Wintering Ground is a book of beginnings—fragile, fierce, and full of potential. Though these poems inhabit a world of cold earth and shadows, they lean steadily toward light, insisting that "rebirth requires death." The collection voyages through an underworld of despair only to rise into something more radiant. Rooted in the East Coast's varied terrain—from Florida's nocturnal highways to Virginia's shifting seasons—these poems map landscapes where transformation is always stirring beneath the surface.
Colin Bailes writes with the sensibility of a gardener and the insight of a mythmaker. Images of seeds, roots, and early green growth blend seamlessly with allusions to the ancient journeys of Odysseus and Aeneas, inviting readers into a space where past, present, and future entwine. Sensory language abounds: lemon trees release their fragrance, seasons turn, and the natural world becomes a guide for survival.
For all who have moved through darkness—through addiction, grief, or the many quiet devastations of being human—Wintering Ground offers solace and the patient promise of renewal. This luminous debut is an ode to return, to reunion, and to the restrained yet persistent act of reaching toward the sun.
The taut, graceful poems in Colin Bailes’ Wintering Ground are assembled out of common materials—turnips, sunlight, feathers, bourbon—and are burning with all the hunger, discord, and self-betrayal of the Greek myths they evoke. They reach for (singing, quietly) the sublime—and find it. A mature, accomplished debut. Bailes is one to watch.
—Edgar Kunz, author of Fixer
Colin Bailes’ Wintering Ground is a beautiful book. The word that comes to mind is crystalline. To name the world, one must first perceive it. To enter into this collection is to enter into a rare state of poetic attention. Yes, this is a redemption narrative, but it is also a book of deep praise.
—Kathleen Graber, author of The Eternal City
‘This life, a constant demolition / Of the self—endless reconstruction, / Pruning spare branches, // The work never complete.’ These lines encapsulate the formidable task that Colin Bailes has set for himself. His project is one of soul making, of fashioning a personal mythology in the tradition of figures such as Theodore Roethke, Paul Celan, and Jean Valentine. These are very august forebears, but Bailes follows in their footsteps with consummate skill, an infallible ear, and an exacting lyric grace. Wintering Ground is a remarkable debut.
—David Wojahn, author of Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems 1982–2004