Cloud Memoir is a collection of Christopher Buckley’s longer poems, his most wide-ranging and serious work built with a symphonic structure—theme, variation, recapitulation trilled with speculative formations, its this/but that, its faith-and-doubt. Rarely did/do the grey cells and the music of experience organize themselves into quick dramatic or pithy movements. These beautifully structured longer poems provide both the metaphysical and putative room to move.
Tomorrow, no doubt, more of us will come
from the Midwest for favorable exchange rates,
the ruins and the partial restorations
of romance; we’ll believe without question
and so run no risk from the church.
But there’s a new inquisition here,
sectarian as the old—it takes us away
from lunch under bright umbrellas
and unsettles conversation over drinks
along the Via Veneto; this red brigade
would kneecap half the glove to get
their way. So maybe it’s as you say—
after all there is no real evidence
