In this strongly visual and environmentally engaged collection, award-winning poet and translator Jody Gladding explores landscape as a source of language in lyrics that operate as physical acts in three-dimensional space.
Deeply invested in landscape, the spiders my arms operates where landscape and language converge. It opens the page into a compositional field in which words appear as constellations to create multiple, interwoven meanings as they interact with each other and with the reader who moves freely among them, fully participating in the making of poems that are spatial, non-linear, and different every time.
Drawn from the environments of northern Vermont and the South of France, the poems in Rooms and Their Airs explore the interface of the human and natural worlds, further eroding that distinction with each poem. The verse here merges subject and object, often giving voice to natural phenomena—a vernal pool, a fossil, a beam of light. These poems sparkle with humor, sophisticated word play, and intellectual examination, reflecting an elegant and contagious curiosity about history, language, and the world. Linked poems give voice to garden vegetables while drawing inspiration from the archival illustrations in The Medieval Handbook. A mother and daughter’s trip to see France's cave paintings uncovers living vestiges in prehistoric depictions and reaffirms the enduring nature of art. With this collection, Jody Gladding cements her reputation as the literary heir to A. R. Ammons, Gustaf Sobin, and Lorine Niedecker.
Jody Gladding's Stone Crop, the winning volume in the 1992 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, was selected from among 700 entries in this annual competition. Stone Crop is a collection of poems written over the past ten years. Many of the poems represent Gladding's attempts to synthesize landscape with sensibility, to restore the organic world's hold on our human imagination—its gossip value. Other poems try to find an effective political language, free of diatribe but not of outrage, frequently using mythical counterparts to make contemporary events resonate. The poems have other traits in common. Their attention often moves from the thing to its name, underscoring Gladding's conviction that the same organic processes generate both. Many wrestle with their metaphors, expressing the poet's attraction to and suspicion of that poetic device. Many layer images, aiming toward texture rather than pronouncement. And most are, at least to some degree, autobiographical.
