The Winds of Home Have Names

The Winds of Home Have Names 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.

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 Weekly Reader that came to her third-grade classroom.

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.