Cloud Birds

Sheila Packa, poet laureate of Duluth, MN, write poems about migrations of birds, immigrants, and women moving through violence. She brings us into and over the borders of love, fear, and the wilderness. Connie Wanek, author of On Speaking Terms, says The meditations and assembled memories in Cloud Birds dissolve layer after layer of the defenses we erect against eternal human fears and longings. Images from the North, from the Iron Range–bears and birches, roads that had no end, only yearning, set the poems in place and in motion. Often the poems do not end in a period: instead they leave us following their trail, a thoroughfare/ of light falling through the pines. Pamela Mittlefehldt, PhD, co-editor of Beloved of the Earth: 150 Poems of Grief and Gratitude writes, Cloud Birds is about bears, wings, migrations–and apples, anger, rivers, roots, coffee, fields, longing, and always, always love. The collection is wonderfully liminal. It is richly shaded and shadowed, a translucent layering of meaning and memory, of dream and thistle. It moves between narrative and music, between aura and the most grounded reality. Many of the poems linger as sound as much as image. Some are ephemeral. Some are achingly immediate. The poems invite the reader to become part of the process. Trust the free fall of Sheila Packa’s voice and imagination. This is the mystery and power of her work.