Drawn from the environments of northern Vermont and the South of France, the poems in Rooms and Their Airs explore the interface of the human and natural worlds, further eroding that distinction with each poem.
The verse here merges subject and object, often giving voice to natural phenomena—a vernal pool, a fossil, a beam of light. These poems sparkle with humor, sophisticated word play, and intellectual examination, reflecting an elegant and contagious curiosity about history, language, and the world.
Linked poems give voice to garden vegetables while drawing inspiration from the archival illustrations in The Medieval Handbook. A mother and daughter’s trip to see France's cave paintings uncovers living vestiges in prehistoric depictions and reaffirms the enduring nature of art. With this collection, Jody Gladding cements her reputation as the literary heir to A. R. Ammons, Gustaf Sobin, and Lorine Niedecker.
"Gladding writes with astounding freshness about essential daily acts that millions perform. That freshness derives in part from the wholeness of her vision (and, one imagines, her life), in which mothering and birthing, for example, are indissoluble from writing. Rooms and Their Airs is a nourishing work."
Poets' Quarterly
In cadences uncannily imbued with the exaltations, strivings, and hesitancies of human thought, Jody Gladding limns interior and exterior worlds like no other. Words atomize on the page; pacing itself becomes a radical and spiritual force, elemental as the trees, stones, landscapes, skies, which infuse these meticulously exploratory and wondrous poems. Gladding paints with great grace the broken / surface where business / must go on’ and the inexplicable universe that contains it, the textures and intricacies of the human mind that strives to grasp while knowing it can only partly understand.”
Laurie Sheck, author of Captivity
Jody Gladding’s poems are original, beautiful, and fierce, sometimes enigmatic, but never gratuitously, only faithfully so. They bring to their world (our world) a unique mix of light, lightness, and depth: a world in which human feeling is not all the author’s concern but more rare, like the human face in Bernifal.”
Jean Valentine, author of Door in the Mountain
Jody Gladding combines deft cadences with an elemental, earthy vision. Gardening, marriage, the seasons and their moons intertwine memorably here. I was especially moved by a sequence of brief poems on Gladding’s young daughter, framed in their turn by two evocative accounts of subterranean explorations in the Dordogne.”
John Elder, author of Reading the Mountains of Home
