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.
Weather Eye Open Poems
About the Book
Reviews
The poems in Weather Eye Open are not easy; it takes time to become acclimatized to their rhythms of thought and play of sound and language. This process turns out to be sheer pleasure.—Lisa M. Steinman European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms
“As I read Sarah Gridley’s Weather Eye Open, I entered a book whose language fascinated me. Her poems are not meant to be immediately clear and accessible. They demand attention. Sarah Gridley wants us to know that, like the weather, language changes before our eyes.”—Bruce P. Spang The Cafe Review"Sarah Gridley's poems progress by long, associative leaps that leave luminous trails behind them—and that always land on sure and surprising ground. Her language is a pure jewel, and yet it manages to bind together the most disparate things—windmills, lilies, sand fumes, milk spray—and make them radiate presence. These are intelligent poems that think with the whole body."—Cole Swensen
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