If you have read any of my vocal or choral pages on this site, you likely have come across the name of Amy Lowell (1874-1925). She is my poet, and I have set, and re-set, many of her works. I'm nevertheless sure that I still have not reached the end of my fascination for, and gratitude toward, Ms. Lowell. Click here for a a list of vocal and choral works based on her poetry, a glimpse of the hold she has over me - all sorts of chamber and orchestral settings for solo voices and choruses.

     She was a Boston Lowell, rich and privileged, but not very

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impressed by show and glitz. In fact her poem,"The Dinner-Party" is scathing in its depiction of the society into which she had been born. She was a member of a group of poets known as Imagists, and for good reason: in one poem she compares the heat and urgency of first love to "red wine and honey" that "burned my mouth with its sweetness"; in another she imagines an elderly craftsman who paints roses upon silk wishing he could paint them bursting into sound; and she says in another, speaking of her failed argument with a smug dinner guest, "...my weapon slithered over his polished surface" (see "The Dinner-Party" link above). These are memorable images indeed and "A Winter Ride" fully lives up to that standard.