The Cloud Path: Poems

by Melissa Kwasny

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 the caretaking, the hospice protocols, the last breath, the aftermath. Simultaneously, she must also reckon with an array of global 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.

Genres: Poetry

120 pages, Paperback

Published April 23, 2024

About the author

Melissa Kwasny is the author of the acclaimed poetry collections The Nine Senses, Reading Novalis in Montana, The Archival Birds, and Thistle, which won the Idaho Prize in 2006. She is also the author of Pictograph: Poems, published in 2015.

Kwasny is the recipient of the Poetry Society of America's 2009 Cecil Hemley Award, as well as the 2009 Alice Fay di Castognola Award for a work in progress, the Montana Art Council's 2010 Artist's Innovation Award, and residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Hedgebrook, and the Headlands Center for the Arts. She has taught as Visiting Writer at both the undergraduate and graduate level, including at the University of Wyoming, Eastern Washington University/Inland Pacific Center for Writers, and as the Richard Hugo Visiting Poet at the University of Montana. Relevant to her teaching for Lesley University, which she has done since 1999, she was a poet in the schools in grades K-12 public schools, mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area for nine years.

Kwasny was born in Indiana and earned an MFA from the University of Montana. She lives outside of Jefferson City, Montana, in the Elkhorn Mountains.

Reviews

[Ada · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hi ressona Ada Limón (pel món natural) i Catherine Barnett (per les referències i l'època vital). Anava a dir que és un poemari sobre la mort de la seva mare. Però, recordant uns versos seus, diria que és un poemari sobre el morir de la seva mare. Bonic.

[Maggie Dunleavy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really loved these poems - they transported me somewhere new and familiar. Gorgeous and tender and grounded in grief, womanhood/daughterhood, and the nature of the wide west

[Steph Carpenter · Rating 3 out of 5]

The entire book, for sensitive readers, is about the author watching her mother die. This was a subject that was too fresh for me, having watched my mother die for over a year. The journey was a terrible one.

That personal note aside, the type of written poetry was not for me; more story than prose IMO.

[David Abrams · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poems about grief, about nature, about pathways to inner healing. Melissa Kwasny kneels, listens to what the Earth has to say, studies the musical patterns of wind and water, and then transcribes those sensory impressions into a collection centered around her beloved mother's death.

[Sarah Spaulding Avento · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice meditations on grief and nature. She’s got some great middle lines. Not a huge fan of her structure though.

[Julieta · Rating 5 out of 5]

no because she went so fucking hard oof