I am delighted to be editing the Tuesday Hub this week with Siobhan Harvey as my guest. Siobhan’s choice of poem is Cloudmother, the key poem from her latest book, Cloudboy, (Otago University Press April 2014).
Siobhan says, ‘Cloudmother’ is one of the key poems in Cloudboy. Its first line – When a child starts school, so too the parents – was the phrase which began the entire journey towards drafting, redrafting and completing the collection, and indeed its companion creative non-fiction essay, ‘A Boy Called Cloud.’ ( Helen says, This essay is a wonderfully moving description of Cloudmother (Siobhan) and Cloudboy’s journey into living with their own unique set of challenges.) Read A Boy called Cloud here.
Of the book Cloudboy, Mary McCallum, our Tuesday Poem co-editor began her review with these words…The way a cloud forms, so the poems of Cloudboy – quiet, controlled, in various shapes and sizes – build inexorably to something larger than themselves, something unexpected and absorbing. A collection of poetry aims to do that, of course, but some collections are narratives, one poem leaning on the others until the story’s out, and Cloudboy, which won the 2013 Kathleen Grattan Award for Poetry, is one of those. Read more here.
I personally recommend both Cloudboy and its accompanying essay A Boy Called Cloud, as excellent educational resources for those wanting to understand more about autism. While Cloudboy is not a textbook it is a beautifully written and sensitive collection of poems written by someone who has struggled with the challenges facing her and come out flying!
Please visit the Tuesday Poem Hub now and read the wonderful poem Cloudmother and Siobhan’s commentary.
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