Publisher's Synopsis
"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 and finely fictional in the first degree, The Rising of the Wind comprises three sections of variations evoking the moment. In the title section, Barbara Riley, owner of the Avenir, uses the Beaufort scale-a nineteenth-century gauge of the effect of wind on a sailing ship-to measure loss, the storm that mounts with coming death. Fourteen villanelles, whose strict form mediates their unbounded emotion, follow from this rising of the wind as calibrated before machines gauged wind speed or gave numbers to degree of fury. 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.
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. An 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.
