Description
The Winds of Home Have Names
by Diana Elser
$14.99 paper
978-1-64662-465-2
2021
Rich with the vocabulary of “exceptional weather,” The Winds of Home Have Names pays tribute to a beloved father, a weather forecaster, drawing a parallel between the earth’s weather and climate phenomena and the emotional phenomena of human behavior—how the “invisible cellular storm” of loss works on us over time, and how we attempt to resurrect the loved ones we’ve lost with words.
Diana Elser followed her twin granddaughters and climate preference to southern California after 25 years in Seattle. She and her husband live in San Clemente, where she is writing more weather and climate poems, and working on two new collections, one about aging and grandmothering, the other about ghouls. She volunteers at, and highly recommends, Beach Town Books.
Roberta Feins (verified owner) –
In The Winds of Home Have Names, poet Diana Elser has taken a potentially common place theme – Weather — and done something wonderful about it. The poet’s memories of her family, of growing up in the 50’s and 60’s, of Western landscapes she has loved are translated into lyrically beautiful lines, both unsentimental and full of feeling. It is a diverse and moving book of poems.
Elser pays tribute to a beloved father, a meteorologist by profession, through poetry that draws a parallel between the earth’s weather phenomena and the emotional phenomena of human behavior. In “Radiosonde” she describes herself as a child, going with him as he launches an instrumented weather balloon. The details are vivid, as is the sense of wonder instilled:
“I want to know where the balloons go ̶
he says higher than you have ever been and
higher than I have ever been.
In “Haboob in Black and White, El Paso – 1956” she remembers him taking pictures of an advancing Chihuahua Desert wind 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 “What My Father Built” her able imitation of her father’s carpentry skills lead her to build a wind-measuring instrument for a school science fair. Trouble is, while well-built, the instrument does not actually measure wind, the way many lessons we learn from our parents are garbled in transmission.
Elser notes the limits and ironies of forecasting accuracy whether for the course of a human life, or prediction of a hurricane’s path. None of the poems are trite or predictable, topics are interesting and even lists (e.g., gods, towns rivers, winds) build toward the knowledge of just how important weather is in our lives, though usually ignored as much as possible.
A list of types of outdoor clothing (“Calculating Possibilities”) amuses and overwhelms us and reminds us of the forces of nature we face in our personal lives. We are well-armored, in “fleeciness and bulk”, while “the weather comes to you naked”. This metaphor leads us to several poems on Climate Change, the largest scope for considering weather’s influence.
The poems cover many different periods in Elser’s life but do not follow a chronological arc. Instead, the book feels like a series of emotional moments, tied together by a Weather theme, as if Elser had dipped into her poetic oeuvre and pulled out the poems that address this theme.
I like the way the poems bounce off each other, in unexpected juxtapositions. All of them are on the theme of weather, and all narrative to some degree, but as you read, you realize that some interesting equations are being proposed. In “Hard Weather, Dimming Hearts”, Elser deftly uses images from The Book of Revelations to talk about global warming.
This means the poems vary in voice, style, and subject, while still talking about weather, love and loss in a variety of ways. There is a wonderful synesthesia among these themes of family and weather, weather and death, self and history, words and water.
Diana Elser (shirt-tail relative onlyRi) –
I am neither a poet nor a scholar on poetry, but I fancy myself knowing something about fine writing. And I thoroughly enjoyed the intelligence, craftsmanship, and huge heart I found in the pages of The Winds of Home Have Names. It is a stimulating work and a pleasure to read. The whole collection works as an assemblage of individual poems and as an artistic whole.
For what (little) it’s worth, in a treasure box of jewels, the pieces I will remember longest were “High Wind Warning” and “Remaindered, 1979.”
USED by PERMISSION of
Fredrick Barton, Writer-in-Residence and University Research Professor
CWW Director, Professor of English, Dean of Liberal Arts and Provost Emeritus
The Creative Writing Workshop
University of New Orleans
New Orleans, LA 70148
Author of In the Wake of the Flagship, The El Cholo Feeling Passes, Courting Pandemonium, Black and White on the Rocks, A House Divided, Rowing to Sweden, Ash Wednesday, Monday Nights