Description
Book SynopsisThe windmill's labor is contingent upon the weather, upon what air masses, at any given time, overlie its landscape. Anticipatory in mood, Weather Eye Open adopts the emblem of the windmill, seeking what Merleau-Ponty calls the inspiration and expiration of Being. The windmill serves as analogue to the perceiving subject, to the poet, whose consciousness, though rooted and partial, is yet always receptive to being energized, turned. Like open sails, the perceiver ushers the weather indoors, converting one motion, the wind, to another, the grinding burrstones. The poems in this collection pursue a similar transmutation through language, a staying open to its various weather (and whether) systems. For Sarah Gridley, language strikes at the X of experience: part presence and part absence, part spirit and part matter, part home and part homesickness, part harnessed and part wild. In the face of such weather, the stance of the poet is both rapacious and passive, searching and struck still.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Cuckoo's Report Cloak The Vernal Landscapes Capsized Wanting the Ten-Fingered Grasp of Things The Body Is Placed, but the Spirit Is Emigrant Rus in Urbe Genealogy Sortilege Prodigal Song The Craft Must Be Lighter-Than-Air What Adjective The Eve Of You Have Given Me Such a Delicious Dish Nocturne Weather Eye Open You Are Looking for Wings on a Wolf Likeness Is the Mother of Love Gimcrack Scenery The Minors Jurisdiction Instructions for the Little Painter Grist Impasto Approach in Removable Galleries Saturation, a Dwelling Place Miller's Ruth Sweet Outline Lost in Atmosphere Noises in Annunciation Locus Amenus Gentle Gnomonics Wild Clary Slipping Jurisdiction Suppressed O: Additional Turns in Outdoor Pragmatism Terrestrial There Is No Answer to What They Think Codlings Etude Death and the Maiden Chatterton Dialogue of Comfort Long Division A Fine Cage Won't Feed the Bird Between Sail and Tiller Industrial Magdalene Swayamvara Ruling Planet Psyche Speaks of Eros What Is Lost in the Fire Must Be Sought in the Ashes Notes
