Love and the Weather

A lyrical inter-weaving of intimate human attachment and the fragile majesty of nature.

In Love and the Weather Susan Gardner offers a lyrical inter-weaving of intimate human attachment and the fragile majesty of nature. In the clearest poetic terms, she alludes to parallels and symbiotic connections between them, with either capable of enhancing or harming the other. With evocative descriptions and imagery, and the poetic recasting of familiar language and phenomena, the author speaks of loss and re-birth, natural cycles, and love in its numerous manifestations.

"The image rules in the world of Susan Gardner and what a delight it is to hear one note from a child's flute resting on air, a fret of rain at dawn. She reminds us how even the smallest change in the weather can help us hear more within ourselves and in the world. In Love and the Weather, everything is a part of everything else: black tea in a mug, the pencil beside a notebook, the manatee the size of a dining table. The quiet exactness, the focused wonder, the moment deeply heard, seen and felt, all emerge in this exceptional book." --J.P. White, author of The Tree Becomes a Room

"Susan Gardner's poetry quietly responds to the world's impermanence with an eye alert to 'each minima of silt' and an ear attuned to the 'rumors of friction wearing at stick and stone, ' its textures infused with the earth tones and shifting geometries of the American Southwest, her longtime home. From the understated gravitas of 'Locked Gate'--an elegy for the murdered Guatemalan poet Ala'de Foppa--to the affectionate ironies of 'Marriage'--love's long haul wryly imagined as an 'aftershock we keep touching'--Love and the Weather beguiles as it whispers. One of its plainest statements, 'I want to stay for a little while longer, ' may best describe its project, which is the project of all art: to preserve what would otherwise be lost." --Steven Cramer, author of Listen

"Love and the Weather will color your mind and calm your soul. Susan Gardner's hand is practiced in the patience of noting every stage of a process, every stroke of a moment, be that the journey of water from cloud to sea, or a meeting with loved eyes over the rim of a teacup. In her landscapes, 'a tweed carpet of leaves' falls from sycamores, 'a fret of rain' enters the day, in the wake of wildfires 'smoke clouds stutter by.' Vivid images bring us her weather, which abundantly includes love that's weathered well. Not to be forgotten are the seldom seen demon that lurks in the mirror, or the deaths that include the unjustly disappeared. Reading this collection you will, as Gardner says, 'inhabit the felt world.'" --Mary Gilliland, author of The Devil's Fools

"In simple, yet artful ways Susan weaves a rich story.... Her poetry integrates natural beauty into the human condition, creating a canvas of words, a recipe for authenticity, music to embrace emotions." --Marvel Harrison, Publishing Director, Mimbres Press, Western NM University

Poetry.