Dear—
Notes and Acknowledgments
The Author
“Everyone always talks about the weather, but no one ever does anything about it.”
This classic joke has taken on an ever-more tragic twist during the past thirty years of increasingly obvious climate change, change that “we” could, should, and must do something about. Much international work on the issue focuses on defining that “we,” which has, among other effects (none of them addressing global warming), launched an interrogation of the “we” in its many social and political aspects, with their own effects, ranging from battles over immigration policy to fiscal unions. All these issues hum subtly at the bottom of Trey Moody’s sweeping collection—sweeping also in the weatherian sense; it has a tremendous momentum that amounts to a tempestuous phenomenon of wind or wave or both.
Increasingly, “weather” has become a synonym for disaster, but Moody gives this tension an historical dimension in the centerpiece of the collection, a retelling of the Lewis and Clark expedition structured around the weather that threatened, and ultimately determined it: in one poem, he states “weather / we want // to control”; in another, he observes “weather won’t / leave, no matter / our attention to / it.”
But ultimately, it is not his content that directs the climate of this book; it is his mastery of the elements of language. Just listen:
Land absorbs sound, deflects some. Traffic tries too hard, neglecting sun’s sheets, meaning grief. I’d say belief is altogether wrong, but I’d be alone—for one, ground soon becomes softer than first thought, less than seconds after.
He will go on in the next line to rhyme that “after” with “disaster,” in an instance of his continual, delicate application of his theme. But it’s above all sound that’s leading here, and it’s sound that fosters intricate and telling connections, such as that among “sheets,” “grief,” and “belief,” all orbiting obliquely around the first syllable of “meaning.” Other links hold “sun,” “wrong,” “alone,” and “one” together in a constellation created by tight sequences that create a commentary that both runs parallel to and deviates from the trajectory of the whole.
Though ostensibly prose, the tight interweave of sound binds the text into a single, seamless gesture that is distinctly poetic in its ability to disrupt linguistic clarity, that supposedly ideal one-to-one relationship between sign and referent, in ways that offer additional relationships, and thus additional dimensions of sensation and possibility. It’s these tangled threads of potential that Moody chases through his acute attention. And this attention is always focused on the actual, the incidental, the mundane.
His relentless interest in the weather is, in part, a way of insisting upon the integrity of the daily, and just as he constructs constellations of sounds, he also creates constellations of the common objects of the world (tree, statue, grass, house, fog), letting them become, on the one hand, emblems of both the specific and the generic, and on the other, recurring occasions for flights of speculation, in which chains of association lead him forth.
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