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    Green is the Orator
    Green is the Orator
    Green is the Orator
    Ebook100 pages1 hour

    Green is the Orator

    By Sarah Gridley

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    About this ebook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of California Press
    Release dateApr 2, 2010
    ISBN9780520946149
    Green is the Orator
    Author

    Sarah Gridley

    Sarah Gridley is Assistant Professor and Poet in Residence at Case Western Reserve University and is the author of Weather Eye Open (UC Press).

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      Book preview

      Green is the Orator - Sarah Gridley

      ONE

      He is hell become heaven, becoming hell; he is evolution, a matter of energy, a star in the dark tomb, a shadow cast by sunlight. He is life that cannot be contained, a holy insurrection, blessed negativity.

      Coefficient

      About the star-cold abundance of August sand—

      this spell of my two hands working in the dark

      I liken to the feeling of your two hands working

      behind me, or your two hands coming before me

      in the white mirth of bright drapes, white lengths

      the wind sends in salt-light through the feeling

      your two hands have in coming to find me.

      There are things I liken to crossbeams

      inside of things I call politeness, things I liken to super-

      intendence, seashells, pale hosts of erosions, fadings

      I liken to insight. There in the window

      of your soloist house, I think that nothing

      is holding up

      this thought that is feeling you moving.

      Salt Marsh, Thick with Behaviors

      In seasoned assertion, the red-winged calling of the grass.

      From spaces outside the territory, the stone summons,

      the stone sum. Weight is a quality known to boundary’s

      swerve. The sum of which is fragile: waves leave mica

      stuck to skin. Some I know of inherence. Some

      I have not remembered. Among the lightest of insects,

      a Comma has a cryptic edge. A woman should behave herself,

      naturally. In mica, the glamorous stammer of mirror—

      A woman should behave herself naturally. Bill-tilt,

      check-call, songspread—a bone flute snapped

      from passage of bird—the unearthed

      played unearthly.

      Table of Consanguinity (The Cousin Chart)

      Once they are there,

      the bearings are theirs, the sickness peculiar to motion

      removed by horizon’s evident flatness.

      What they bear is the date, and whatever will follow.

      Bay of gray margins, mobile as curfew. Rollick of tides

      and empty casements. Stone-deaf stones marking thoughts

      out loud. Schist like a book of tempers.

      Stars in dogged pantomime.

      Exactly what

      the waves were for lengthening.

      Slow, elemental line. Gray like the saint of a put-out fire.

      Sea of gray margins, solemn as seals. On it a flash

      like something wrong. On it the falling quiet.

      What they touch is the moss

      like an earthly expense.

      Green in a poise

      almost vernacular, almost the sensible

      guide to North.

      Diminution of the Clear Thing

      My somnolence is

      the rest of trees (sessile touch around dry leaf

      to know my weirdest passiveness). To go the irises

      the pebbled drive the luminous

      claps into valley.

      When you have posted a letter in the open air,

      an artist will know your feeling,

      will ground the clouds in canines of noon,

      gold leaf pressured over graphite sun.

      To feel outside an envelope—

      unchangeable corner mailbox blue—

      there are words in the morning against

      the mind, containing sleep

      in the shape of walking. A nomenclature castle opens to sky:

      grassy

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