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
