Elegy with Clouds & in Bloomington, MN

In
Elegy with Clouds &,
Robin Turner begins with the question: "When the mothers leave, / what are we supposed to do?" One answer this elegant collection offers is to look "where blood meets blue / a poem blooms." Another is to keen. To name every blue thing. To look to "woolen clouds...generous, / mother soft." To walk through door after door, each with hinges that "give & gleam." In short, in the face of tremendous loss, Turner offers us the solace of being present - on this earth, with its beauty & its scars, its absences & everywheres.
-
Amie Whittemore
, author of
Nest of Matches
Robin Turner's
Elegy with Clouds &
is a vivid almanac for a sorrow season, recollecting "an absence & / an everywhere, a before & an after, my trickster / mother, a shape ever shifting." These poems sound the distances between mother and daughter, between daughter and her childhood self, hueing the intimate and elemental in the spaces that bridge them: a "ruthless unspooling of days," a night ocean, white rocks, "blue lips in blue light." Turner's deft lyrics pare line and sound down to the stark relief and concavities of grief. What a mother may forget, a poem may call back; a leaving's silence may bloom into clouds. These fine poems keen and dream their way towards "the return of the red resurrection flower...its intricate blossom a year's dark, deepening."
Sally Rosen Kindred
Where the Wolf
Robin Turner's luminous
opens with a fear that lives in all of us: the loss of one's mother. In this collection "blood meets blue / a poem blooms." What more could one ask of poetry but to speak this truth? The poems that follow simultaneously mourn the loss of a mother and remind us that there is peace in beauty. A single, white swan gives us space to "practice silence," while a later poem opens a window to sky. Sorrow isn't simple and sometimes isn't quiet, as "Keen" and "Flight" show us. The collection's closing section begins with a doorway open to the future. Grief is still present, but so is memory, and these are found simultaneously in lily ponds and rain and sky.
Christine Klocek-Lim
, editor of
Autumn Sky Poetry DAILY