THE WEATHER NOT THE WEATHER

Poetry. Published by Outside Voices, 2008.

Homage, mockery, and compliment, the man/boy who fears death inhabits the aesthetics of himself (and as is the case, his friends) in younger days. Like bathing in a virgin’s blood, “back roads leading/to garbled / sexual advances”, Royer points his hands into your body and makes more than just the mouth move. There is an acceptance in this poem(s) of what is inevitable, showing a maturity, or stoicism, that years of snow reinforce, “even / the loveliest/things are attended/by/loss.” – Kevin Thurston

the weather not the weather refuses the codex’s conventions—words tumble across pages as mesmerizing choreography exploding white space into rhythmic momentum of textual constellations accumulating, poem pushing into poem to create enjambed performance of perspectives, distance, landscapes, time. ‘Even the loveliest things are attended by loss,’ and in Royer’s hypnotic book the presence of what is not there makes itself and makes itself again alongside the erasure of what is. Memories engulf as they darkly slip away, figures become a nothingness refusing to settle into shape or state, and ‘the woods/ seem/ foolish/ beautiful and worthless. — Mel Nichols