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...

Green is the Orator follows on Sarah Gridley s brilliant first collection, Weather Eye Open, in addressing the challenge of representing nature through language. Gridley s deftly original syntax arises from direct experience of the natural world and from encounters with other texts, including the Egyptian Book of the Dead and the writings of Charles Darwin, Peter Mark Roget, William Morris, William James, and Henri Bergson. Gridley s own idiom is compressed, original, and full of unexpected pleasures. This unusual book, at once austere and full of life, reflects a penetrating...