The Weather

Beryl Baigent is a poet; her published collections include Absorbing the
Dark, Hiraeth: In Search of Celtic Origins, Triptych: Virgins, Victims,
Votives, and Mystic Animals.

During her tenure as a visiting fellow at the University of Cambridge,
Lisa Robertson embarked on an intensive exploration of the rhetorical
structure of English meteorological description. She cites as
inspiration for this book Wordsworth’s Prelude, which served as a
guidebook for the rustic, and John Constable’s cloud sketches. The
volume’s free verse poems are organized by day of the week, with the
first section entitled “Sunday.” The “Tuesday” section opens
with an admission: “My purpose here is to advance into / the sense of
the weather, the lesson of / the weather. I’m afraid I’ve blown the
lesson.” Unfortunately, the poems are too obscure, too arid, too
cloudy to truly engage the reader, although perhaps those who wish to
study the shipping forecasts and climatology would benefit from
Robertson’s research.