The Winds of Home Have Names

<p>The <em>Winds of Home Have Names</em> is a debut selection of poems that deftly musically maps with words a complex system of grief weather and climate change love and memory. Poet Diana Elser pays tribute to a beloved father through poetry that draws a parallel between the earth's weather phenomena and the emotional phenomena of human behavior. Exploring fog wind drought thunderstorm water cycle and the cycle of grief-how we come to terms with loss over time and crowd against what would still take us.  Both unsentimental and full of feeling Elser's poems sprawl across the western USA from El Paso in the south to Great Falls Montana; Salt Lake City Boise Seattle and San Francisco. </p><p><br></p><p>With the opening poem titled Memory Buckled for Take-Off she invokes the spirit of her father a meteorologist describing a spelunk into the family boneyard. She introduces us to bots sorting prophecies and debacles of what she calls human weather that rage and buckle referring to memory and to herself as deep-sea diver trickster-conniver. The poems that follow launch a weather balloon into a night-time snowstorm; recall driving her father's ashes home and remember him taking pictures of an advancing Chihuahua Desert haboob from the roof of their house then seeing those pictures reproduced in a professional journal-and in the <em>Weekly Reader</em> that came to her third-grade classroom.</p><p><br></p><p>In Hard Weather Dimming Hearts Elser details human sins against the earth what we killed and ate what we bought and sold burned and threw away-and consequences: bodies built to save us turn against us sabotaged...we never meant to love money more.  She notes the limits and ironies of forecasting accuracy whether for the course of a human life or prediction of a hurricane's path.  Other poems involve a failed science project an encounter with ghouls at a rest stop the weather-responsive wardrobes humans collect and the power of an old newspaper clipping which inspires the chapbook's title. It triggers a brain-locked dust devil which spins Elser into a conversation with her father's ghost-in which she uses the names of local winds to introduce the grandchildren and great children he did not live long enough to meet.</p>