In Wordsworth’s 1807 description of ‘golden daffodils’, the breeze animates both the scene and the inner life of the speaker. Like many poets, Wordsworth turned to the weather to mediate between internal and external experiences. In this episode, Sarah and Sandeep look at the ways in which weather has functioned as a poetic tool, and consider three recent poems which describe the intimate and communal effects of atmospheric events: Maureen McLane's ‘Rocks’, with its ‘rain/when I’d just told her it would hold off’; ‘Surface Mapping’ by Jake Skeets, describing the death of 191 horses on Navajo land during a drought; and Ishion Hutchinson's ‘After the Hurricane’, in which the silence after a violent storm becomes a space to assess different forms of aftermath.

Read Maureen McLane's 'Rocks' in the LRB:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n01/maureen-n.-mclane/rocks

Book tickets to a live recording of this series: https://lrb.me/ptwtickets

Get 25% off a 12-month subscription to Close Readings with the code ’POETRY25’ at checkout here: https://lrb.me/crpoetry

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