Cloudshade - by Lori Howe (Paperback)

About the Book

In every season, life on America's high plains is at once harsh and beautiful, liberating and isolated, welcoming and unforgiving. The poems of Cloudshade take readers through those seasons, illuminating the intersections between the external and internal landscapes.

Book Synopsis

In every season, life on America's high plains is at once harsh and beautiful, liberating and isolated, welcoming and unforgiving. The poems of Cloudshade take us through those seasons, swinging wide a glassless window to life in the West--to antelope flowing seamless over dirt roads, boom and bust ghost towns, deep, glacial lakes ringed with glowing aspen trees, ice fishing by the Northern Lights, and as in "High Plains Solstice," live music on summer nights that

carves hot petals
through our bodies
in its ritual of tides
and light;
licks us open
from the inside
until we are night-blooming jasmine
seduced by the moon.

Cloudshade is a book for everyone, from poetry lovers to those who don't usually read poems. If you've ever waited through five or six months of winter for the first signs of spring, stood outside to feel the first, long-awaited summer rains, caught the wood-smoke and cottonwood scent of fall, or stood on a frozen lake, listening to winter rumbling and heaving through the ice, these poems will carry you back to what is elemental and haunting about life on the high plains, as in "On the Ice," where

We wait, silent, hearing with our feet
the seething of ultramarine blood,
the twitching of bones,
rumbles of omens
and restless spirits.
The ice stretches and heaves,
cracking like gunshot,
and beneath that, glints and gleamings
of sound, like whales
calling across the darkness.

In the poetic tradition of James Wright and B.H. Fairchild, these poems are rooted in the mercies of daily life, illuminating the intersections between our own internal landscapes and those that surround us. Howe offers a fleeting portrait of that intersection in the poem, "En Route to My Father's Funeral"

At a pale crossroads,
in an open shop two floors up,
a welder works into the night.
His arc is lonesome in the cool air,
gobbets of fire
like unformed angels
falling.

Whether you live on the high plains or it lives in your memory, the poems of Cloudshade, like the first summer rain, bring the sounds, scents, and the vividness of life back to us, whole.

Review Quotes

In Cloudshade: Poems of the High Plains, Lori Howe gives song to landscapes abandoned and unadorned, places where "wind has erased its hieroglyphs." Whether shadowed by ghosts, weather, or the fragility of love, Howe staves off loss with precise and vivid language. Her voice is "mineral and granite" enriched by "a gracious plenty of color." Her powerful poems are mercy and light. -Alyson Hagy, author of Snow, Ashes, Graveyard of the Atlantic, and Boleto: A Novel In Lori Howe's Cloudshade we are presented with the seasons of a Wyoming year beginning in an unusually dry June, the earth pulling in on itself. The year passes with the coyotes' distant call, the dark of a prairie bar and its human inhabitants born "...neon blue/and feet first/into a field of summer/harmonicas." Then there is the rain that falls from the clouds but dries before it hits the ground, the empty houses and towns, the railroad sidings abandoned and rotting, everything that is lost and--by most people-forgotten. And no matter the season there's always a storm brewing somewhere not far away. With the return of spring in the collection's last section, the rain finally arrives and the pronghorn antelope graze on the green grasslands but it's a brief time of plenty in a land that we learn was never meant for humans, "never meant to host a softness/of bodies." -David Romtvedt, author of Wyoming Fence Lines, Some Church, and Certainty As we read Lori Howe's wonderful collection, Cloudshade: Poems of the High Plains, we discover what the poet, W.H. Auden, called, "Topophilia," a sudden encounter with the landscape. When landscape becomes more than mere geography, and more than mere reflection of a speaker, we find in this collection, due to Howe's diligence, places of beauty and disaster, and the poems become a testament of these places where "there is no marker / cast in bronze, / only the empty stare / of gin bottles, / curled leather boots, / and shards of sapphire tiles / left to mimic the sky." Within these poems, place reminds us of the unrelenting nature of time, and our fleeting human lifespan within the long reality of life in the harsh high plains, but if we read these poems close enough, we will also unearth evidence of hope, of how we endure. -Lindsay Wilson, author of No Elegies