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Green is the Orator
Green is the Orator
Green is the Orator
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Green is the Orator

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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
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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