Weather Eye Open

New California Poetry

by Sarah Gridley

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 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.

Genres: Poetry

118 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

BA Harvard University, 1990
MFA University of Montana, 2000

Assistant Professor of English, Case Western Reserve University

Reviews

[Doku · Rating 2 out of 5]

A free poetic spirit, definitely. The lyrical prose (poetry should have some rhymes here and there, right? ) throws a lot of invitations, but constantly makes sure the reader stays out of it, a cold spectator. Thus, not easily enjoyable.

[Stef · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sarah Gridley is, by far, the most intelligent, engaging, and inspirational woman I have ever met. That should be glaringly evident from her first collection here - an incredibly dense, challenging, at times frustrating work that is, in the end, nothing but rewarding (and slightly baffling). These poems might leave you gasping for air, but the way they juxtapose all that should seemingly never intermingle sets the mind racing and reeling in the most pleasantly perplexing ways.

These poems are, as Sarah often says herself, gestures - they are invitations to share the experiences she's created, and to create your own. They are suggestions, richly allusive and elusive. They whisper hints that may echo around your brain before they begin to take any sort of shape; they create an intangible-yet-gritty loveliness through their oblique associative suggestions. These are pieces that must be felt before they can be "understood."

If you just don't "get" it, perhaps you're taking poetry (and yourself) a bit too seriously. Or maybe Sarah has just left us all in the wreckage of the intellectual juggernaut that is inseparable from her poetry. These pieces aren't going to hand you anything, and they're going to make you work. But the end result: You can sit back w/ a smug grin on your face and realize that while you might not have a clue what you just read, you sure as hell enjoyed the experience.

[Kent · Rating 3 out of 5]

My guess is that this one is one of Calvin Bedient's picks. I say that mainly because the poems here are excessively insular--to a point that I don't feel invited, let alone welcomed, into the poem. I guess there's a way of reading these poems that I'm just not so good at. Some of the poems, generally, the ones whose form is spread over the page, has a lyric fluidity that is enticing. Otherwise, I felt there was a continual walking inside and inside until I could no longer follow.