Cloudboy writes his own version of Genesis. He invents a new language. He sketches intricate maps. He reads Aristotle and develops an obsession with Dr. Who. He interrupts. He sways. His fists come clenched and swinging. To onlookers, Cloudboy seems troubled - and is trouble. This book is a deeply mulling and richly sensitive account of a mother's adjustments to the needs of an autistic child. This prize-winning suite of poems grows out of extremes of love and frustration, as the poet introduces a bright, unpredictable, markedly individual boy to the rigid, often airless, routines of the school system. Any empathetic parent knows the fears and anxieties of sending a young child into the world of other children, their casual cruelties, and their dreamy naivety. Each concern is exponentially increased when a child's educational and emotional needs set them apart. Cirrus, cumulus, arcus, stratus - cloud forms speak to author and poet Siobhan Harvey of the phases of the mother-child bond: the mood-swings and leaps of her child's mind; the mutability of personality; the attraction and evaporation of human kindness; presence and absence; reverie and forgetfulness; the intensity and yet bittersweet transience of early childhood. With a limber, gorgeously metamorphic sense of sculptural and sonic aspects of poetic form, the book is a tender and detailed atlas of a child's imaginative potential. Yet, one of the most remarkable gifts it reveals for the reader is Cloudmother's own finely calibrated perceptions.
Cloudboy
