Weathering: Poems and Recollections

In Weathering: Poems and Recollections an aging poet greets a
phalanx
of memories and finds himself amid
an epic transmigration of echoes.
At the heart of this collection of poetry and prose are three retrospective essays that narrate the adolescent poet’s coming of age through encounters with such eminent elders as James Dickey, who was Havird’s early mentor, Robert Lowell, and Archibald MacLeish. These prose memoirs also explore this poet’s ambivalent relation to his native South and reveal the emergent cosmopolitan stance of his mature poetry. The poems, set mainly outside the South–amid the rubble of ancient Greece, in galleries at the Louvre, on hurricane-pummeled Cayman Brac–ponder mortality and metamorphosis; explore relationships, especially the complex relationships of child to parent and husband to wife; and engage with cultural artifacts–a Byzantine church, a derelict windmill, Puebloan petroglyphs–as well as traditional works of art and literature. These poems of Havird’s maturity, together with a clutch of early ones rooted in the aspiring poet’s youthful encounters with those elders, are elegant artifacts themselves, at once rueful and wry, thought-ridden and visionary.