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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, author of Where the Wolf Robin Turner's luminous Elegy with Clouds & 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

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