Four Weathercocks

By Cassandra Cleghorn, Chair and Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English. Marick Press, April 2016. Available on Amazon. Let’s consider wind a force as internal as it is external, that there is a spiritual wind as surely as there is an elemental one. Thinking so might be prerequisite work to hear Cleghorn’s granular, singular, creatively music and the world to which it gives score.” So writes Dan Beachy-Quick, responding to the landscapes of Four Weathercocks. These poems are charged with the wills and desires of humans who move “through marsh and sinuous burrow,” alone or in small bands, taking the measure of moments, working together or at cross purposes. The places themselves are at risk. In one poem a subterranean fire tracks a tree’s root system, in another the shore is coated in crude oil. Domestic interiors are no less wild. The poet does what orienteering is possible in such conditions, using every sense and sound available to her. Bruno Latour says that, “things do not exist without being full of people.” In these poems, Cleghorn tests and tracks that fullness.