“Ice Mountain,” Dave Bonta’s most recent poetry collection, consists of short poems etched in an immediate present. Each poem is nine lines long, and carries a date as its title. The collection begins with a poem entitled “22 January, 2014”:
in the owl’s flight
as in the conifers it left
that late morning silence
and at the woods edge
the frozen carcass of a cow
pecked at by chickadees
bare trees like forks
the sky too is a dish
best served cold