Shadow of a Cloud but No Cloud

Shadow of a Cloud but No Cloud is the latest offering from enigmatic prose-poet Killarney Clary. Like her earlier book, Potential Stranger, this is a book-length sequence of unnumbered, untitled poems. Shadow of a Cloud but No Cloud, in poem after poem, evokes crystal-clear moments in time in fraught domestic relationships. One can almost hear the speakers inhaling and exhaling worry or gratitude in the spaces between speech, emulating or reflecting the sparkling or bleak landscapes around them. In a poem that begins ?We watched ravens?,” ostensibly about two people in a car at a truck-stop on a desert highway, the speaker muses: ?As long as we were not speaking, I wouldn’t hear what I was afraid you’d say. I wouldn’t say the words I’d be sorry for. Doesn’t the wind need to rest? A motley sparrow turned his working, calico eye to the sun, heated the mites then dusted them. Tending to himself, he looked bad.” In another poem that begins ?There went my chance to say”: I never said that. We are on the phone. I am wondering, Could I have said that? as you speak forward into other news, what might be. I run behind, see what you have missed. I am missing too. Oh but what I let you say.” This quietly haunting book, remarkable for its subtlety and delicacy, is Clary’s strongest, most engaging book to date, and amply shows her to be the master of this most difficult of lyric genres.

Killarney Clary is the author of three poetry collections: Who Whispered Near Me, By Common Salt, and Potential Stranger, the last also published by the University of Chicago Press. She lives in Aptos, California.