About the Book
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.
Table of Contents
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 & 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 Orator’s 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
