Once Was A Weather

Trey Moody's newest chapbook, Once Was A Weather, was recently released by Greying Ghost Press. The collection builds itself around a series of prose poems, each one titled "A Weather" and highly-attuned to the sonic landscapes they produce. Repetition and rhyme permeate these pieces. For example, the sixth instance:

Why a. Why not bring bodies back to home. Bones before our tracks, after parks cleared leaves. Why radio. Listen listlessly, then sleep. Why weather becomes a lack—language suffers, like you. Paths, too, refuse use. Why department. Why soda. Five calendars of blue. Light lingers long as memory, but why winter. Music wanes, despite the view.

The paragraph, obviously, is overloaded with alliteration and anaphora, and closes with the hard rhyme of "blue" and "view." But regardless of these auditory effects, the speaker of the poem posits a particular failure when addressing the topic of weather, and a subsequent inability of the audience to making meaning (or at least make meaning easily) when we read: "Why weather becomes a lack—language suffers, like you." The reason for this failure can, perhaps, be found in the opening sentence: "Why a," which echoes Zukofsky's claim that "one might spend a whole lifetime considering the difference between 'the' and 'a'." Taking these sentiments literally, if one needs a lifetime to determine the proper article in a particular instance, how much longer would it take to translate the weather into language? More than a lifetime, no doubt: hence the "lack." This question is further complicated in "This Hemisphere Of Leaves," as Moody adds the concept of identity to the formula:

I am not the moon, nor am I the tree.

What is writing. What is debris.

More questions, of course, to let you scratch your over; buy the book, my friend, and try to figure them out.