Difficult Weather

By Rose Solari and Katherine Young

This new edition of the first full-length collection of poems by award-winning writer Rose Solari provides an important window into the origins and early influences of this now-established poet and novelist. Though most of these poems are set in Washington, DC, and its less affluent suburbs, their lyrical, often elegiac depictions of family and neighborhood life, first love and first losses, will be sure to touch anyone who, like Solari, grew up in a place "more interesting than safe." In selecting Difficult Weather for the Columbia Book Award, Carolyn Forché, now Director of the Lannan Center for Poetry, said of Solari, "Her language is by turns raw and luminous, her perceptions uncommonly acute, and her vision at once incisive and compassionate." Michael Collier, Director of the Bread Loaf Writer's Center, wrote that she is "a poet of passion and precision... Difficult Weather will delight and surprise us all." This edition features a new introduction by poet and translator Katherine E. Young, who places Solari's early work in a national context, and traces some of the poet's most powerful influences, such as the work of Anne Sexton. Its publication, timed to coincide with that of Solari's third poetry collection, The Last Girl, insures that all of Solari's published poetry collections are now in print, for her fans to savor and for new readers to discover.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Santa Fe Writer's Project
• Release date: Nov 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9780991408764

Book preview

Vagorum

Acknowledgments

Thanks are due to the editors of the following publications in which these poems first appeared:

Gargoyle: Letter From Sligo Creek and John and His Sister; Only: An Audio Magazine of Women Poets: Five Seasons in Pieces; The Plum Review: Distances; Poet Lore: Juggling; Sou’wester: December 25, 1991 and On Photography; The Westminster Review: The Function of Memory’ and An Arrangement in Place and Distance."

I would like to thank the Maryland State Arts council and the National Endowment for the Arts for a grant that made the completion of some of these poems possible.

Chicken Fights also appeared in the anthology Just Like Girl: A Manifesta! (GirlChild Press, 2008).

Currents, December 25, 1991, and Truro also appeared in the anthology American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2000).

Some of the poems in this book were also included in the chapbook The Stolen World, selected for the Artscape Publication Prize, 1993.

As with the first edition, I must thank Derrick Hsu, founder and publisher of Gut Punch Press, for his brilliant editing and enduring friendship. I am grateful to my teachers Michael Collier, Rod Jellema, and Stanley Plumly, who fostered, critiqued, and had faith in the work; to my astonishing group of women writer friends, particularly Verlyn Flieger, Cynthia Matsakis, and Sarah Pleydell; and to my literary big brothers Reuben Jackson, Glenn Moomau, and Richard Peabody.

Looking back on it now, I see how much this collection was influenced by the vibrant arts and literature scene of the Washington, D.C., area in the 1980s and 1990s. I am deeply grateful to the owners and staff members of such places as D.C. Space, Olsson’s Books and Music, Atticus Books, and Vertigo Books, who provided reading venues and support for writers of all sorts and schools, and who promoted the first edition of this book. Heartfelt thanks are also due to Caroline Forché, for selecting Difficult Weather for the Columbia Book Award for Poetry, given by the Poetry Society of Washington, D.C., and to Dave Smith, who selected Five Seasons in Pieces for an Academy of American Poets’ University Prize.

For Joseph Vincent Solari

&

James Leslie Williamson

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction to the Second Edition

Invocation

1

Around the Corner

Last Night I Tried to Walk You Out

Vanishing Act

December 25, 1991

The Function of Memory

Juggling

First Communion

Chicken Fights

Currents

Truro

2

Between Our Fingers

The Weather

For Robert, Falling and Running

Another Start

Five Seasons in Pieces

Epiphany at the Olney Ale House

From the Roof of the Sheraton Washington

Completion

On the Beach

3

The World Outside

Letter From Sligo Creek

On Photography

Distances

The Beginning, 1939

An Arrangement in Place and Distance

John and His Sister

Love Poem

Difficult Weather

Secrets

Celebration

Note on A Story

A Story

Introduction to the Second Edition

Poetry is an ancient art—poets are proud of that fact. I myself know poets who channel Homer using American rap idioms and Theocritus by way of Appalachian folk ballads. But it’s also true that much poetry—and art in general—is faddish, transient, ephemeral. U.S. publishers award literally dozens of first book prizes for poetry each year—some of those, like some of the poets who win them, also faddish, transient, ephemeral. Of course, not all poetry needs—or deserves—a long shelf life.

It’s a moment for celebration, then, when a poet’s first book is reissued in a twentieth anniversary edition. Rose Solari’s Difficult Weather was written in the early 1990s, published by Gut Punch Press in 1994, and selected for the 1995 Columbia Book Award