Cloud Song

In Cloud Song, Leslie Schultz is a master gardener. The beauty and abundance of her poetry springs from both a generous nature and a cultivated sensibility. Like the couple in her delightful character study "Gilbert's Hobby," she tends the "rampant garden" of free verse and the carefully shaped bonsai of formal verse with equal attention and skill. Her poetic garden is filled with sunlight and color and changing weather. What she offers is not an untouched Eden, but a real world populated by deftly-drawn characters existing in various states of fallen grace, a place where the poet's attention always wanders from ideas of order toward the real beauty of the ephemeral: "sun slipping / behind the western trees, fish/tumbling in sparkles over the dam, / this garden in riots of color and seed." Rob Hardy I celebrate this beautiful new collection of poems from Leslie Schultz: her skill with form, the precision of her language and meter. These are stunning poems that witness adventure, awaken the senses, and reach the heart of the reader. Stella Nesanovich Elizabeth Bishop. Wallace Stevens. These were the first names I thought of reading Leslie Schultz's Cloud Song-especially Bishop. There is a quiet elegance to the book, and an openness to small details that usually go unnoticed; we ride-and I will use Schultz's phrase-"our ship / on the breath of the world." Here, just as Virginia Woolf would have painted her words through the artist Lily Briscoe to find the essence of a situation, so Schultz paints through her poems, with a textured and meticulous touch. It is no surprise, then, that the collection is often organized through ekphrastic work. While the focus of the book is the unexpected, Cloud Song is especially welcome in the age of the Internet. So many stories yell to be heard, and yet with Schultz it is as if she is revealing eternal structures, patterns, and themes. I would prefer such a master any day. Kim Bridgford

• | Author: Leslie Schultz
• | Publisher: kelsay Books
• | Publication Date: Feb 15, 2018
• | Number of Pages: 102 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 1947465597
• | ISBN-13: 9781947465596