Author : Melissa Kwasny
Publisher : Milkweed Editions
ISBN 13 : 1639550933
Total Pages : 86 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (395 download)
Book Synopsis The Cloud Path by : Melissa Kwasny
Download or read book The Cloud Path written by Melissa Kwasny and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2024-04-23 with total page 86 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An imaginative reworking of the elegy that focuses on the difficult work of being with the dying. At the heart of The Cloud Path, celebrated author Melissa Kwasny’s seventh collection of poetry, lies the passing of her beloved mother: the caretaking, the hospice protocols, the last breath, the aftermath. Simultaneously, she must also reckon with an array of global crises: environmental decline, the arrival of a pandemic, divisive social tensions. With so much loss building up around her, Kwasny turns to the natural world for guidance, walking paths lined with aspen, snow geese, and prickly pears. “I have come here for their peace and instructions,” she writes, listening to the willows, the “slant rhyme of their multi-limbed clatter.” What she finds is a new, more seasoned kind of solace. The Cloud Path glimmers with nature’s many lively colors—the “burnt orange” of foxes, “cedar / bark cast in the greenest impasto,” white swans intertwined. It also embraces the world’s harsher elements—a dark bog’s purple stench, a hayfield empty of birds. Witnessing life’s constant ebb and flow, the weight of personal and collective grief gradually becomes lighter. The shapes of clouds, cattle bones by the river. “Why not,” she asks, “believe it matters? Evocative and wrenching, The Cloud Path compels us to consider the whole of living and dying. An elegant juxtaposition of personal and planetary loss, these keen and tender poems teach us to see afresh in the lateness of things.
