David St. John Calls Parks' Book "Poetic Romp"

Catalina Eddy

by Lorine Parks

Genre: poetry
Poet's Web site: www.lorineparks.com
ISBN 978-09826024-7-8
$12.00 
Published 2012 by Conflux Press

CATALINA EDDY: Undercover Hero or Ordinary Thug?

Lorine Parks’ Catalina Eddy is one of the most surprising and hilarious poetic romps I have ever read. Weather is “the family business” of these meteorological guys and dolls, molls and mobsters, of whom Eddy is only one of a charming and somewhat disreputable array of noirish figures. The characters here are utterly and universally delightful, and both the romantic and family relationships of these cocky weather systems and their attendant “effects” make for some of the wittiest sagas I know. We have all experienced the profound arrogance of weather, of course, but Lorine Parks makes it clear that it’s always personal! One leaves this collection knowing that Mae Gray and June Gloom and Eddy himself definitely have it in for us. Yet the elegant – if at times bittersweet – music of these poems and their shifting emotional “eddies” remind us that there is as often as not a dark and somber (not silver) lining to these particular clouds.

 Nevertheless, there is something deliciously vaudevillian about Lorine Parks’ humor, and to those of you who find comfort watching the daily weather report, I’m hear to report that Catalina Eddy has told me your days too are numbered.

--- David St. John

"I spend every day of my life trying to think of new poetic ways to describe our oddly routine Southern California weather patterns.

Try as I do, I can't get close to Lorine's beautiful work! A lovely treat for those of us that ponder the daily ebb and flow of the marine layer."

Fritz Coleman, KNBC Weathercaster

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