Ocean of Clouds: Poems

By: Garrett Hongo

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Synopsis: In his fourth book of poems, award-winning poet Garrett Hongo sees coastlines and waters, skylines and ancestral lines for what they inspire and teach.In a surpassingly beautiful collection of poems, with his characteristic long-lined, rolling music, Hongo is alert to the possibilities of individual moments of perception and grace in the landscapes of his life, whether waiting for a ferry in Balboa after a writing workshop (&“An oil slick from a yacht . . . / Spread rainbows on the water, an aleph / curving toward us&”) or hanging out and playing LPs with the late, great poet Michael Harper, or watching his daughter in the sun with a halo of messy twelve-year-old&’s hair, or listening to the sea, which speaks to him in so many places: at the Wai&‘ōpae Tidepools, at Cassis, at Divi Bay in Saint Martin, where, he tells us, &“I thought of writing to the soul of Nâzim Hikmet, / saying loving a woman was like writing a book— / . . . it is love&’s body on which you write a page of kisses . . .&”These poems of cloudy moons and sandstone cliffsides, the black glass of lava shattered into sands, waves surging, and stories of a poet&’s gratitude for the journey he has made, come together to make a paean against forgetting.