The Rising of the Wind

Poems by

Barbara Riley

Three Poems from The Rising of the Wind

ISBN: 0-930829-52-2. $15

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In "The Rising of the Wind" Barbara Riley's sensibility digs deep. She puts us in touch with life at sea as insightfully as she does with the experience of the daughter accompanying her dying mother. This is a mature and passionate woman's voice.
Margaret Randall.

Fiercely lyrical, fictional in the first degree, Rising of the Wind comprises three sections of variations evoking the moment. Using the Beaufort Scale, a 19th-century measure of wind at sea that has been described as one of the great found poems in the English language, Barbara Riley shapes the title section into a series of villanelles informed by her years in the Caribbean, living aboard her sailing boat, Avenir II, where weather dictated the course of the day and the boat’s vulnerability to storm, an impersonal rigor. In the correspondingly rigorous series, which follows the rising of the wind with terms assigned before machines gauged the wind or gave numbers to degrees of fury, Riley’s Beaufort Scale measures loss, the storm that mounts with coming death.
Twenty years in northern New Mexico have brought Riley different weather but an equal urgency to shake loose unexamined thought from its moorings. The short poems of the second section, “Leaf and Seed,” specify discrete events, familiar ephemera—sunflowers nodding in a Taos field or a child’s heartbeat seen at six weeks—yet each poem emerges from a particular history of perception to assign a future belonging only to the reader’s inner world. The final long, first-person poem, “Learning to Swim in a Red Sea,” is a fiction taken from images of the dharma wheel of life, with characters represented in the splash of first person against a tide of cultural expectation: betrayals of body and mind leaving only seasons to embrace what is not simple.


Photo: John Tollett

Barbara Riley, who lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is the author of Grow, Grow, Grow, a richly illustrated picture book based on her poem, “Little Seed, Sound Asleep,”
which traces the season of a sunflower seed. A free-lance literary editor as well as a regular reviewer for The New Mexican, Riley has published poetry in Sin Frontera, Primavera, and The Manzanita Quarterly. Her short story, “Mirage,” won the 2002 Duquette Science Fiction Contest.