Product Description

Winner of the 2007 FIELD Poetry Prize, J. W. Marshall's inaugural full-length collection is profoundly moving yet sharply wry and unsentimental. The volume opens and closes with a lyrical, sideways narrative series of poems, each set in an institution--the first a trauma hospital where the author recovered from severe injury, the second a nursing home where his mother moved following a stroke. Between the two sections are poems of the self in an often unsettling society. Throughout, Marshall's language is startling and musical, his imagery unusual, sometimes comic, and often haunting. "John Marshall's poems are without sentimentality, without excess, and without guile. They envelop us in a plainspoken chaos, singing a quiet and terrifying lullaby that records the world as it becomes defamiliarized through loss." --Catherine Barnett "Watchful, ruefully comic, alight with playful lyric precision and a plainspoken rhetorical elegance, Meaning a Cloud is not only a record of one body's recovery from injury, but a rendering of the mind's companion journey: pained, stubbornly amused, at last arriving at a state of visionary completion. It is a sorrowing, hopeful book, all of a crucial, embracing piece." --Susan Hutton

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #477200 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 79 pages

About the Author
Along with his wife, J. W. Marshall is co-owner of Open Books: A Poem Emporium in Seattle, one of two poetry-only bookstores in the United States. He holds an MFA from the University of Iowa, and his two chapbooks were finalists for the Washington State Book Award.

Customer Reviews

J.W. Marshall has been around poetry all his life
J.W. Marshall has been around poetry all his life, and has worked a job in a poetry bookstore just to be around it more. The sum of all his experiences is here in his debut anthology of poetry "Meaning a Cloud". Witty, brilliant, yet tokenly somber at times, Marshall's poetry comes to life on each page with vivid, colorful imagery sure to jerk at reader's emotions. "Meaning a Cloud" is highly recommended for community library poetry collections and anyone who wants warm poetry. My Confusion: I confused a steam/with life. And I confused leaves/oiling along on it/with lives. And the lake/it muscled into/I confused with a hospital's/shimmering glass doors. There was quiet/ and muffled non-quiet./And I was confused/with where exactly it was/I was going/when I heard that ambulance/moving like a mechanical leaf/through traffic.

Vivid and heartbreaking
J.W. Marshall's 'Meaning a Cloud' is one of the most impressive poetry debuts I've come across in some time. The subject matter is frequently hard -- injury, hospitalization, illness, death. But the poet serves as our Virgil through this gloomy landscape and his presence is constantly reassuring, as he pierces the moody fog with beams of humor or fresh perception. The long sequence "Taken With" is particularly successful; I am especially moved by section 25 of this poem, which begins: "I am beyond tired because / my mother / slipped off. / The slow theory that /
she would vanish has / come to fact. / Now she is dead all the time."
And it gets even better from there. This is fresh, moving and memorable writing about the hard facts of human existence. I'm already looking forward to Marshall's next work -- and to reading this one again.

Meaning a Cloud
From the first stanza ("There was this hospital / that came into my life / at the end of an ambulance"), John Marshall's Meaning a Cloud entices the reader into the extraordinarily careful world of illness and recovery, using language that feels "plain" but that expresses extreme states of perception and being. I was astonished by the wit and humor in these poems--there is such a tender balance here between gravity, honesty, and comedy in so many of them, including "Television in Hospital," which concludes: "sure you can touch my toes / which gives you I guess / a certain meaning but / must you visit while / my show's on." Longer, darker, surreal poems like "Sadness Therapy" are punctuated by small studies such as "April": "Reading while walking / a fist of cherry blossoms / punished her." The arc of Meaning a Cloud takes the reader through poems exploring hospitalization and re-introduction to world "outside," poems about the effort to ground oneself in daily life and love, and then through a series of numbered poems re-visiting illness, mortality, creativity, and carrying on, through reflections on the speaker's mother's stroke and death. In these last poems the sense of humor persists, but I was literally brought to tears by poems like #22, about a man at the rest home who repeatedly asks the speaker "Was that man I saw a while ago over there my mother?" "I said no again like I was a visiting academic." After returning to clean out his mother's empty room following her death, the speaker wonders: "And what if I had said I'm your mother and still love you?" The tone of the book is calm, direct, frank, and wry. The craftsmanship of each individual poem is remarkably fresh--I found myself particularly surprised and charmed by the way Marshall breaks lines throughout the book, and by the sense of cadence and rhyme in the final section. These poems demand space in the reader's head, and I often found myself smiling and resting the book in my lap for several minutes between them.