Cloudshade: Poems of the High Plains

In every season life on Americas 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 thatcarves 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 dont usually read poems. If youve 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 whereWe 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 Fathers FuneralAt 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.