Weather Eye Open Poems [Paperback]

The windmill's labor is contingent upon the weather, upon what air masses, at any given time, overlie its landscape. Anticipatory in mood,Weather Eye Openadopts 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.

Sarah Gridleyreceived an MFA from the University of Montana, where she was named the 1998 Richard Hugo scholar and won the 1999 Merrian Frontier award. Her poems have appeared inJubilatand theBeloit Poetry Review.

Sarah Gridley's poems progress by long, associative leaps that leave luminous trails behind themand that always land on sure and surprising ground. Her language is a pure jewel, and yet it manages to bind together the most disparate thingswindmills, lilies, sand fumes, milk sprayand make them radiate presence. These are intelligent poems that think with the whole body. Cole Swensen

Acknowledgments

Cuckoos 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
TlS.