Green is the Orator
-
- $16.99
-
- $16.99
Publisher Description
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 mind at work—one that is thinking through and re-presenting romantic and modernist traditions of nature.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Unusually varied, usually sparkling, and always a bit of a challenge, this second outing from Gridley (Weather Eye Open) pivots ably between an introspection alert to the workings of language and a sustained attention to environmental fact. Long, careful lines in the first part of the volume emphasize botany or ecology: Doubt put off, put on as leaves. Where spoils undress/ the weeping beech and go in circles inside it. Like Forrest Gander, Gridley uses technical terms freely, and yet connects them to the shifting states of her own mind: To blossom is thoughtless, she says when she sees touch-me-nots ; thus we barely have room/ for each other. Gridley also delves into philosophy, phenomenology, and even philology, the study of the history of words, in poems inspired by the life and accomplishments of Peter Mark Roget (as in Roget's Thesaurus), whose adventures with nitrous oxide get almost as much space as his arrangements of words. Gridley has also written a lyrical book, whose unrhymed sonnets, fragments, and quasi-odes make good use of traditional tools condensation, analogy, mystery: It was left to the ocean to matchstick the hull/ left to the darkroom to develop the trees.
