Cloudboy is a deep-mulling, richly sensitive account of a mother’s adjustments to the needs of an autistic child.
This prize-winning suite of poems grows out of extremes of love and frustration, as the
poet introduces a bright, unpredictable, markedly individual boy to the rigid, often airless routines
of the school system. Any empathetic parent knows the fears and anxieties of sending a young child into the world of other children, their casual cruelties and dreamy naïvety. Each concern is exponentially increased when a child’s educational and emotional needs set them apart.
Cloudboy writes his own version of Genesis; he invents a new language; he sketches intricate maps; he reads Aristotle and develops an obsession with Dr Who; he interrupts; he sways; his ‘fists come clenched and swinging’. To onlookers, Cloudboy seems troubled, trouble. Cirrus, cumulus, arcus, stratus: cloud forms speak to Harvey of the phases of the mother - child bond; the mood-swings and leaps of her child’s mind; the mutability of personality; the attraction and evaporation of human kindness; presence and absence; reverie and forgetfulness; the intensity and yet bittersweet transience of early childhood.
With a limber, gorgeously metamorphic sense of sculptural and sonic aspects of poetic
form, this book is a tender and detailed atlas of a child’s imaginative potential. Yet one of the most remarkable gifts it reveals for us readers is Cloudmother’s own finely calibrated perceptions.
Winner of the Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award, 2013.
Featured in the 28 AprilNew Zealand newsletter.
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