The Cloud Path by Melissa Kwasny
Milkweed Editions, April 2024, $16
One of the great delights of reading Melissa Kwasny’s fifth collection of poetry, The Cloud Path, published by Milkweed Press, is experiencing the voice of a poet at the height of her powers. This dense collection is a meditation on grief and recovery: sorrow at her mother’s passing, at the world as it is undergoing the COVID-19 pandemic, and at the natural world as it is ravaged by humankind. What keeps the entire collection from lapsing into darkness is the bell-like beauty of her language and glorious precision of her imagery.
Four sections of seven to sixteen poems—“Glass Vocabulary,” “Stone Cottage,” “Path of Melting Ice” and “Sleep Practice”—are introduced by the opening poem about her mother’s passing, “The Cloud Path.” They carry the reader through the seasons through struggles with the dual sorrows. In the stunning “Glass Vocabulary,” part-love poem, part-pandemic lament, Kwasny portrays the fragility of her world and the world around her: “Glassed in behind the tempered, the beveled / the opalescent or float glass, it is grief for the fragile / world that we wake to together.” Set by the sea, “The Stone Cottage” moves back and forth between Kwasny’s stone cottage and stories of the stone cottage John Keats and Ezra Pound shared in Sussex from 1913 to 1916. “Pretty green bank,” began one of Pound’s half-lost poems, and, in this section, Kwasny’s language is similarly fairytale-like as she describes the mysteries of her world: “the deer’s glass slipper. / The rabbit’s keyhole,” and the eerie woman in a blizzard who “stands atop the flat roof of her trailer house / with a shovel, overlarge boots unlaced.”
In the third section, “The Path of Melting Ice,” we witness not only the great relief of spring on the landscape, the burst of color, the lupines with their “deeply divided hands,” but healing, for, as Kwasny notes, when you reach the end of something, "turn around before going forward.” This exuberant section is rich in life and color—blackbirds, boblolinks, “rainbow-lipped branches” and, as celebrated in “The Aspen Path,” “water everywhere.”
The final section, “Sleep Practice,” Kwasny continues to take us down the paths she created from the collection’s opening—Clouds, Aspen, Chokecherry, Bitterroot, Ferns—each a different way of discovering the natural world, of finding a way forward through loss. In “Sleep Practice,” Kwasny melds her wakefulness “fighting the mind, who or what is its opponent?” with meditations on the world around her: swans, cedars, eagles, the moon. The wakefulness becomes the poet awake in the world—it is a conversation with the netherworld as she strings together statements resembling prayers into the dark: “I want to practice faith, not belief, faith in the day brought back to me.”
In the “Prickly Pear Path,” Kwasny states, “We borrow from earth the metaphors we will need.” Certainly, Kwasny has followed her own advice. Her imagery, in its clarity and music, is stunning. Ice “flannels over the soft earth” and the willows have a “slant rhyme of their multi-limbed clatter.” Her metaphors move beyond the specific to the universal: her lessons about loss and the natural world translate into questions that challenge us all. In “Sleeping with Swans,” Kwasny writes, “You can have days like this, weeks, in the circle of artists time / when you waddle through transformation, / the shame of swans . . . . It is lift that you, too are after, and after it, / the calm. But what to do about the wounded swans?”
We are so grateful for this poet’s wakefulness in the world that lamps our paths forward.
Thank you, Milkweed, for the advance reader copy.