Small Weathers

by Merrill Gilfillan

Poetry. Author of numerous books of short stories and award-winning travel and nature essays Merrill Gilfillan is a poet of remarkable vision, insight and accomplishment. His poems speak of the natural world: earth, sky, water, and all the complexities and contradictions of human presence in that world. Jim Harrison said of Gilfillan's most recent book of essays, Rivers & Birds, "If anyone writes better prose in American I am unaware of it." SMALL WEATHERS is Gilfillan's tenth and largest collection of new work. Tom Raworth has this to say about Merrill's poems-"If John Clare had toured the United States with Oscar Wilde, their notebooks, twisted together in a tornado and edited by Audubon and Escoffier, might have read like these poems; evocative, sophisticated and as ever-in-the-present as memory must always be." Cover art by Win Knowlton

Genres: Poetry

136 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got turned on to Gilfillan by his last book, the one issued by Flood Editions, and I went back to some of his earlier books.

This one is long, maybe too long for a book of poetry (136 pages). Like a hiphop record, there are some gems and some not-so-gems.

One of my favorite poems in the book so far is "Thanksgiving 1988." The book is of the walking genre; that is, the poem is about going for a walk, like some of O'Hara's poems in New York, or naturalists' walks like Thoreau or Leopold, where the walk dictates the content and the flow of the poem. I ain't gonna spoil it, but there's an element of nature vs. humanity here, which could go well with Elizabeth Bishop's "The Moose" (also kind of like the walking genre, only the narrator's riding in a bus).