Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru
Weather in Normal, The
Weather in Normal, The
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Disgrifiad Cymraeg / Welsh Description
Mae pedwaredd gyfrol o gerddi dychmygus, mynegiannol Carrie Etter yn archwilio'r newidiadau i'w thref enedigol Normal, Illinois, yn yn dilyn marwolaeth ei rhieni, gwerthiant y cartref teuluol ac effeithiau newid hinsawdd ar dirwedd a bywyd Illinois.
Disgrifiad Saesneg / English Description
Carrie Etter is known for beautifully expressive and formally inventive verse. The Weather in Normal, her fourth collection, explores the changes to her hometown of Normal, Illinois following her parents' deaths, the sale of the family home, and the effects of climate change on Illinois' landscape and lives.
Manylion y cynnyrch / Product details
- ISBN 13
- 9781781724590
- Gwales Code
- gwales.com.9781781724590
- Gwerthwr / Vendor
- Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru
- Long Title
- Weather in Normal, The
- Awdur / Author
- Etter, Carrie
- Current Price ex VAT
- £9.99
- Current Price inc VAT
- £9.99
- Availability Status (EN)
- Available
- Availability Status (CY)
- Ar gael
- Dyddiad cyhoeddi / Publication Date
- 2018-09-27
- Cyhoeddwr / Publisher
- Seren
- Media Type (EN)
- Paperback / softback
- Media Type (CY)
- Clawr meddal
- Pages
- 72 pages
- Size
- 138 × 216 mm
- Language Code
- English
- Categori / Category
- CY: Barddoniaeth (yn Saesneg) | EN: Poetry (in English)
- Is-gategori / Subcategory
- CY: Beirdd Unigol (yn Saesneg) | EN: Individual Poets (in English)
Bywgraffiad yr Awdur / Author Biography
Originally from Normal, Illinois, Carrie Etter lived in southern California for thirteen years before moving to England in 2001. She has published four collections of poetry and edited the anthology, Infinite Difference: Others Poetries by UK Women Poets. She is Reader in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.
Adolygiad y Cyhoeddwr / Publisher Review
Carrie Etter’s fourth collection takes us to the poet’s hometown of Normal, Illinois. This collection focuses on Etter’s losses – from her parents to the family home – and the expansive prairie landscape increasingly threatened by climate change. It forecasts the weather in Normal at this particular moment in its story. The collection is split into three discrete sections. The first is a retrospective examination of family weather, focusing on the speaker’s parents during the last years of their lives. This is how, the collection suggests, one orients oneself when returning to Normal: through one’s father and mother. Yet this is disorientating too: the speaker’s parents are no longer the ‘unbreakable’ care-givers of childhood, but mortal, fallible human beings (16). This is especially moving in Etter’s prose poem, ‘Fatherhood’, which recalls her father’s obsession with witnessing, measuring and reporting the weather (12). We are told that he communicated with, and related to, his daughter by monitoring her weather (‘my temperature, precipitation, wind speed, and humidity … my extremes’ (12)). Weather thus becomes both literal and metaphorical. It is a point of contact, a way of knowing someone intimately – though, it is implied, its accuracy depends on perception. ‘[S]ometimes I listened’, the speaker notes; ‘[s]ometimes I spoke of the sun and the rain as though I held one in either hand’ (12). ‘My Father and the Blizzard’, meanwhile, enacts the relationship between individual and weather by showing the direct consequences of being hospitalised during a snow storm (13). Here Etter uses form impressively, juxtaposing her speaker’s impressionistic account of her father’s illness with excerpts from an article reporting on the Valentine’s Day blizzard of 2007. Etter’s measured rhythm combined with white space between phrases suggests, as a later poem puts it, ‘breadth and breath’ (‘Trying to Say’, 26), and the blank silence of the white-out. Like the snow, the father’s coma comes relentlessly. Weather report and poem converge to ‘coma a weatherless world’ (13). Etter’s second section deals with the landscape of home, envisioned as an open, undulating prairie (25). Etter’s wordplay, exploration of etymology (‘partum’, ‘praerie’, ‘prairie’) and use of spacing puts the ‘air’ in ‘Prairie’ (25). Like her later ‘An Invocation’ (45), this has a spell-like quality, intended to open up past lives, conjuring absent memories into the present (though ‘An Invocation’ is angrier). ‘Afterlife’, Etter’s sequence that is centred on the family home, shows us the domestic space of ‘house / home’ no longer occupied (27). Here Etter’s spaces widen, transforming into fault lines between those phrases indented left, and those indented right. They demonstrate the imaginative gaps – spectral absences between past and present, life and death, childhood and adulthood, memory and imagination, ‘(him & her)’ (29). Particularly striking is the way the speaker enters and leaves the house: ‘[…]as a familiar might out the back open the glass door into twilight’ (41). Rhyme and assonance here (‘might’/ ‘twilight’, ‘back’/ ‘glass’) suggest partial closure – the kind that comes with acceptance. There are new residents; life moves on. There is no such closure for the final section of the collection, however – the poems in which Etter is at her most political, and her weather is most extreme. In ‘Scar’, Etter’s sequence that brings together people and place, landscape and weather – and in which the speaker transforms into Normal’s fauna in lines marked in parenthesis – she demonstrates a virtuosic command of form. Her final poem, ‘And Now for a Kind of Song’ (66), offers both hope and ambivalence for ‘a song in the body, the body in Illinois’ (66). Meteorologists attest that weather, though able to be explained, is notoriously difficult to predict. We can say how and why the storm hits, but the exact set of circumstances under which it travels, and its impact, are only apparent after the fact. In her depiction of Normal, Etter balances certainty (climate change, like death, is inevitable) with the uncertainty of human (individual, societal) responses. Overall, Etter’s collection is diverse yet unified, both accessible and complex. Its personal and political approach to climate change is as charged and dramatic as the purple lightning-split sky of Jason P. Ross’s cover photograph.
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