The Cloud Path

“‘Quiet is different than silence, the latter more potent, / more mature,’ Melissa Kwasny writes late in this book of expertly managed and captivating poems, the surest of her career. By then we know the subjects of The Cloud Path: the bereavement of a daughter who walks with her mother’s memory; the adjustment of a lesbian couple to a country town where ‘the villagers, with their upper hand, are dangerous’; and an everyday animism in nature where ‘the fact is, consciousness matters; matter knows it.’ The thinking is dynamic, oblique, and agile in these poems of deep stillness, of conviction: ‘Given my disposition, I will live in one place, / not trembling like the aspen, but swaying / like the heavy spruce, troubled by forces larger than me.’ The concerns and grief that stir so many of us move through this poet like she is their instrument. She transmutes their power. ‘It is not silence without my lost ones in it.’”

“Melissa Kwasny writes the poetry I want to read as the world ends. Complicating the boundaries between love and grief, abundance and scarcity, these stunning poems help us navigate our shared twenty-first century catastrophes. Despite her skepticism (or because of it), Kwasny’s ‘faith in the intellectual supremacy / of earth’ gives her the courage to linger on life’s difficult truths. She reports back to us in a sparkling syntax and breathtaking clarity that only deepens our gratitude for what the earth provides, then takes away. ‘Redeemed by proximity to these last of religious signs,’ Kwasny writes, ‘if I believed in priests, I would confess to the pines.’”

“Expletives and hallelujahs rose from heart to mouth in equal measure as I read these lush, wise poems that grieve both a dead mother and a dying Mother Earth. A meditation on aging in a fragile global moment, Kwasny’s The Cloud Path is essential reading for anyone who cares about our planet and its inhabitants, for those enduring loss, for those who value the creaturely as well as the eternal. And for writers, well, this book is a transcendent how-to, a guide and a treasure to read alongside contemporary literary naturalists such as Terry Tempest Williams, Camille Dungy, and Kerri ní Dochartaigh.”