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RAINBOW WEATHERby John Curl
These poems are songs for the road ahead, as climate change
transforms how we live on earth. Today we find ourselves hurled all too soon
into a future where all living things must adapt, and human society must change
rapidly in order to survive. We have no choice. We must change the ways we live.
Through poetry, the art of words, destructive energy can be dispersed and
transformed into constructive energy. We're in a long-term and short-term
social and cultural crisis, with the fate of our planet at stake. This is a
time for poetry.
People have such a long history of destruction, yet at the
same time people have also always risen from the depths of despair, overcome
the challenges of their time and reshaped the world. If we go back far enough,
we all have ancestors who lived in good, sustainable ways, respectful to their environment and to their neighbors.
Only history will know how human society will look when this century is passed.
This is a century for poetry.
The climate crisis marks the end of a cycle that began with
the industrial revolution. Since every ending also marks a new beginning, here
are some capsules of energy to take with you into the new beginning, energy in
the form of poems, poems to transform the world by unleashing the power in
words.
~ John Curl
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In
the poem Making the Invisible Visible John Curl could be describing the work of
poets. It is so much easier to expect the details of the world than to actually
see them. The poems in Rainbow Weather challenge the reader to release
expectation and received hierarchies and in exchange, to retrieve wonder.
Current circumstances being what they are, the treatment for collective malaise
is probably complicated, a combination of things with many moving parts, but
somewhere in that combination there is
certainly space for the calm, understanding observations in this poetry
collection. Curl's poems stand with grace, sing with power, and may be part of
the cure.
~ Kim Shuck
7th Poet Laureate of San
Francisco Emerita
With
a single, ancient, unfashionable word, “Lo,” John Curl changes the game plan of
the planet: “Lo! The circle is drawn around us. / The candle is lit. The power
of water enters….” “Now,” he argues, is “the ancient boiling point…now/ the
ancient flash point of rebellion.” These poems are not so much a call to arms
as they are a call to thought—and, beyond thought, to action. “Every place is
the center of the world, / and everywhere is our place of origin.” At a moment
of confusion on all levels, Curl realizes (and makes us realize) that the
ancient, despised, mostly ignored art of poetry is the key to recovery. As the
Trumperians know, words can shock. Words can heal, too.
~ Jack Foley
author of When Sleep Comes:
Shillelagh Songs
John Curl’s passionate, heartfelt poems
for the Earth in Rainbow Weather are wake-up calls announcing the
environmental atrocities that surround us: clear-cut forests, pollution,
radioactive waste, ubiquitous plastic. He doesn’t turn away from any of this, but
pleads instead to see everything more clearly: “Let the scales / fall from my
eyes. / Lift the veil. / Awake, arise!” And this brings hope, for once the
scales and veils are removed, both he and we are bathed in “the healing light
of reality.”
~
Lucille Lang Day,
coeditor
of Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California
and
author of Birds of San Pancho and Other Poems of Place
