Green Is the Orator

Green is the Orator follows on Sarah Gridleys brilliant first collection, Weather Eye Open, in addressing the challenge of representing nature through language. Gridleys 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. Gridleys 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.

“Orators speech springs from revelation and desire, but its heart is in its observational exactness and reticence.”

"The poems in Sarah Gridley's new book have the sharpest of intellects and the tenderest of spirits, sonically superb and wildly engaging."—Kazim Ali, author of The Far Mosque and The Fortieth Day

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

Contents

1

Coefficient

Salt Marsh, Thick with Behaviors

Table of Consanguinity (The Cousin Chart)

Diminution of the Clear Thing

Half Seas Over

Jardins sous la Ppluie

Sweet Habit of the Blood

Is He Decently Put Back Together?

Under the Veil of Wildness

Coming to the Festival of the God of Boundaries

Makes an Arrangement

Return of the Native to the Widespread Hour

Midlander

Thicket Play

Honey Ants

Recessive

Sending Owls to Athens

William James, Henry James

Arethusa

Arrowsic

Eidothea

Sunrise with Sea Monsters

Where Hardly Hearth Exists

2

Sonnet on Fire

The Bad Infinity

Baroque

Miscellany

Baroque

A General Discrimination of Synonyms

Baroque

Antonyms and Intermediaries

Baroque

First Inspirations of the Nitrous Oxide, Pneumatic Institute, 1799

Baroque

Second Inspirations of the Nitrous Oxide

3

Disheveled Holiness

Medieval Physics

A Boredom of Spirit

Gothic Tropical

Film in Place of a Legal Document

Japonisme

Against the Throne and Monarchy of God

Acousmatic

The Orators Maximal Likelihood

The Beauty of Where We Have Been Living

Anatomy of Listening

Sighting

If It Be Not Now

Ovation

Morse Gives Up Portraiture

Intrinsic

Intimations

Constable of the Sweet Oblong

Work

Salon/Saloon

Strokes

Building Box (Atlantic)

Posthumous

Oratorium

Summer Reading

Notes

Acknowledgments