Naming the Wind

"In Steven Rood’s brave and lyrical debut collection, Naming the Wind, the quixotic project of naming the wind is a metaphor for how we struggle to make sense of what is beyond our control. This is the work of a mature poet, one who makes the details of everyday life luminous and gives meaning to suffering while offering a glimpse of the sublime." * Colorado Review *
“Tender, curious, yearning, and full of astonishment, Rood’s poems reside in the wondrous entanglement of place and self, present and past, body and mystery. Rood’s poetry bears the marks of a life lived, of experience understood, just as his intimately observed California landscapes bear traces of geologic time. Insight awaits here, as a cache of ‘harder, ocean-smoothed pebbles’ emerges shining from a spine of ‘soft sandstone’ on Mount Diablo. Of such a pebble, Rood writes: ‘It is where art lives, and I can rub it in my palms.’ His poems, too, are where art lives. This book is a force of tenderness, a visitation of wisdom.” -- Liza Flum, Francois Camoin Fellow, University of Utah
"Late in this ranging and wild book, this Naming the Wind, Rood offers—this in response to an older poet’s challenge—'I have power, depth, fear/ as my tones, and uncertainty as my shape.' And the beauty and the multiplicity of uncertainties—that call, that calling forth—is what this book stakes its being on; and partnered to that is the acknowledgment, throughout these pages, of the profound power of intervals, of how sound’s suspended 'until a silence glows around it.'  But I would be remiss if I failed to note how the book’s populated too with visitations (sightings and sittings) and that its praises include, among others, dybbuks, Dinobots, the 'ten or fifteen turkeys eating quietly amid the/ wild oats' of Twin Peaks, as though—rising or not rising off these pages—they were the storied wild birds of heaven; and other locations named into being, places equally unlikely—'Weedlot I’ve kept my eye on for thirty years,' e.g.—as well as the tantalizing possibility of a 'walk off the path into Hallelujah.' Steven Rood writes, 'Maybe I’ll turn to dust and befriend the wind.' Read this book." -- C. S. Giscombe, author of Ohio Railroads