Ocean of Clouds: Poems

In his fourth book of poems, award-winning poet Garrett Hongo sees coastlines and waters, skylines and ancestral lines for what they inspire and teach

In a surpassingly beautiful collection of poems, with his characteristic long-lined, rolling music, Hongo is alert to the possibilities of individual moments of perception and grace in the landscapes of his life, whether waiting for a ferry in Balboa after a writing workshop (“an oil slick from a yacht . . . /Spread rainbows on the water, an aleph / curving towards us”) or hanging out and playing LPs with the late great poet Michael Harper, or watching his daughter in the sun with a halo of messy 12-year-old hair, or listening to the sea, which speaks to him in so many places: at the Waiʻopae Tidepools, at Cassis, at Divi Bay in Saint Martin, where, he tells us, “I thought of writing to the soul of Nazim Hikmet, / saying loving a woman was like writing a book—/...it is loveʻs body on which you write a page of kisses…”
    These poems of cloudy moons and sandstone cliffsides, the black glass of lava shattered into sands, waves surging, and stories of a poet’s gratitude for the journey he has made, come together to make a paean against forgetting.