Weather Eye Open: Poems / Edition 1

by Sarah Gridley

Overview

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 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520242937
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	04/01/2005
Series:	New California Poetry , #13
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	120
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Sarah Gridley received 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 in Jubilat and the Beloit Poetry Review.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

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