Some Weather

Description

A television screen is a place to warm a child’s hands….the barrel of a gun tunnels through history…a puppet’s frown is a life lived wrong…time shifts, and global warming becomes long weather. With this book, such acts of poetry map new alliances: the lyric word whispering in the office, singing in the family, charting policy for the land. Scot Siegel makes individual epiphany the key to social discovery. History, planning, and public understanding all feel the touch of his poetry-the right words placed well. His readers will experience a giddy readiness, will lose the ability to separate poetry from the jolt of discovery in daily life.
Kim Stafford, author of The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer’s Craft.

Scot Siegel’s Some Weather is a guide, a rally for consciousness to sanctify the details of “how we legend our selves.” Even “after the crack of last gavel wobbles into starlight,” Siegel, steadfast, assures that integrity is timeless, changeability of voice may offer transcendence, and that each generation is held to the “arched lid of the world” by a tenderness, not simply human, but “thinner and sweeter than ether.”
Maureen Alsop, author of Apparition Wren

Some Weather brims with poems ready to look “…down the long barrel of some/ unknown history,” poems unafraid to confront “…the unbound pages of a book called our inheritance.” In this first collection, Scot Siegel – urban planner and lyric ponderer – emerges as a voice grateful to discover “What a child knows/ without our saying:/ blossoms/ under ashes!” His readers will be grateful for each of his discoveries, for all of his delights and affirmations.
Paulann Petersen, author of Bride of Narrow Escape and Kindle

Scot Siegel’s poems are unafraid of joyous things. Some poets steer away from nostalgia and sentimental love, but Siegel is so full of gratitude that he makes everyday pleasures – family memories, bright words from his children, the promise of marriage – shine. And because he is so humane and generous toward life, his poems about struggles and griefs feel both finer and truer. Here’s a poet who is comfortable with reporting out the range of human experience. His poems are both the songs and the weather of a full, interior life.

David Biespiel, author of Wild Civility,
editor of Poetry Northwest

Poetry : American – General
Nature : Environmental Conservation & Protection – General