Cloudshade: Poems of the High Plains, by Lori Howe
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Cloudshade: Poems of the High Plains, by Lori Howe
Ebook PDF Online Cloudshade: Poems of the High Plains, by Lori Howe
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.
Cloudshade: Poems of the High Plains, by Lori Howe - Amazon Sales Rank: #3436933 in Books
- Published on: 2015-11-14
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.02" h x .19" w x 5.98" l, .28 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 78 pages
Cloudshade: Poems of the High Plains, by Lori Howe Review 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
About the Author Lori Howe is the author of Cloudshade: Poems of the High Plains (Sastrugi Press, 2015), High Lonesome: A Poet's Guide to Wyoming Ghost Towns (Elm Books, 2016), and Stories from Earth: Millennials, Literature, and Teaching Writing that Matters. Her poems, short fiction, and non-fiction appear in numerous journals, anthologies, and books. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Wyoming. Editor in chief of Clerestory: Poems of the Mountain West (clerestorypoets.org), she lives and writes in Laramie, Wyoming.
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Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful. ” Like these lines from “Midnight Gospel By Academic80sBaby If there is a single phrase in Cloudshade that could encompass the general feeling a reader gets from indulging in these poems, it is “vivid as the first scent/ of an orange.” These lines from the poem “Tangible Stretch—Royal Gorge, CO” speak to the clarity of the work presented in this collection.Lori Howe’s attachment to landscape is more than a theme; it is a way of knowing. To feel your way through her stories, you must know her language as something “Elemental as wind,/ as blood,/ these wild prophets/ give me back my own tongue/ when I cannot/ find it.” Like these lines from “Midnight Gospel,” and like the “low-slung bodies” from the same piece, Howe is “not asking to be saved.” Rather, she invites you to stay for a while in the terrain that so influences her style and gives her the voice to speak for this land.
The collection of poems is separated into sections by season, starting with Summer and ending in Spring—ending, if you will, with a surreal sense of hopefulness. Like the epigraph at the beginning of the collection that announces “I stand between the blue of summer and the lake of forgetting,” Howe’s work often declares its in-betweenness with a balance of the unearthly and the material, as with the “Ghost Houses” that “do not know/ that they are dead.” Indeed, at first glance, there appears to be a lot of forgetting—like the stagecoach stop with the sun-shot porch in “Far Between Towns” that appears as abandoned as some of the other high plains imagery in Howe’s poetry. The seemingly desolate landscape is what sets us up for this feeling of isolation. But by the time we reach Spring in Cloudshade we could hardly forget where we started, and we remember that the isolation is only temporary, sometimes more or less an illusion; above all it reminds us that it has its own beauty. It begins in heat—something rather unusual for a high plains landscape, somewhere that almost never suffocates us with high temperature. It’s this initial desperation in the voice of “Rain Coming,” Cloudshade’s opening poem, that sends us through the rest of the collection in search of relief. And we find it in the words, in the imagery, and in the culmination of Howe’s book.Howe’s poetry lifts itself out of the scratchiness that can be the high, dry desert, and into a soft place of observation. She is tied to the landscape and sense of place where one can get lost and feel grounded at the same time, where the dirt itself can be dangerous and yet we still feel a longing to be rooted in it. With a lyricism that gives the palate its own roll, Howe becomes like the cottonwoods in her poem “Offerings,” what she describes as “the archivists of the centuries.” She records these mostly-forgotten places and the way they appear trapped in time. Her poems are the pressed leaves between pages of a library book that we now share in our community of readers.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful. This Book is Wyoming By Jersey Exile I had the pleasure of living in Wyoming for 18 years, visiting nearly every city and town, crossing the state in all directions (often diagonally to eventually go north or west from Laramie), during all of the year's seasons. I've seen what Lori's seen and felt what she's felt. But she is a poet, and I am not, so she has written what I never will. Wyoming is skies so blue that in winter they seem nearly black reflecting off the snow. It is rain or, more often, the lack of it. Long vistas, wind, dust. Antelopes that race cyclists along little-used ranch roads. Joy and loneliness. Vibrant communities and dying towns. It is also sadness, which she captured gently in The Eight, a tragedy I lived through and will remember all my life. This is poetry for people who love the west, want to understand living in the west, or think that poetry is too gauzy or cryptic. This book is Wyoming, and I love them both. This is based on a review copy I received.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful. Poetry of the high plains By anne brudevold Lori Howes’ poetry collection "Cloudshade,” published so well by Sastrugi Press, paints vivid pictures of the changing seasons of the Wyoming prairies. There is a real beauty, loneliness, bleakness and contentment in her lines and cadences. She tells how the vast spaces of landscape can fill the arch of person's foot in an oversize boot. Her poems, vivid but down to earth, make the reader hear a train whistle over the high prairie and feel the wind pushing through grain fields. She gives an almanac of weather of the high plains from summer through winter to spring. From heat and drought to rain and freezing, to the rebirth of spring that brings summer again. The poetry is sparse, mimicking the landscape, but rich with in an array of emotions that a person can have though a long year. The language leaps between sense and meaning, quietly catching us when we don’t expect it. “Cloudshade” is a gem.
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