I can’t find a perfect word for Jeff’s book. Luminous. Refulgent—whatever that is. Ineffable, except that sounds vaguely vulgar.

Anyway, his words are better—

Tadpoles that died on the porch and went rotten. Him and Sharon, neither of whom melted the other into a puddle. A somewhat famous poet, also clueless. Chicken manure piling up inexorably. A crisping and drowning planet. Johnny A.’s coffin. The mother who got all her friends to read The Feminine Mystique six weeks after it came out. Corn creaking in the breezes, its temporary monotonous green cities every summer, how it crowds together closer than any crowd. Parsecs and parallax angles (goodness). Nephilim bones under the Adena-Hopewell mounds. Turbines across the prairie, twisting and spinning to serve the sweet and bitter will of women and men.

He even quotes Sir Orange Baboon (NOT Jeff’s words), on wind energy.

“We can say so little clearly and surely,” writes Jeff (so I hope he won’t mind this). “So much is hidden, not by any conspiracy but by the nature of this world and our small place among the ten thousand things, between the two infinities.”

Jeff Gundy. Wind Farm: Landscape with Stories and Towers. Dos Madres Press, 2021.

 


 

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