Against the Impossibility of Our Yearning: A Review of Cleaving the Clouds by Margaret Anne Kean

Margaret Anne Kean’s chapbook, Cleaving the Clouds, is a record-keeping, an elegy, and a deep investigation of grief written in response to the loss of her parents, who passed away within a span of 27 days during the COVID pandemic. At the start, the poems remind me of my first reaction when I lost my father in 2018—I remember a whirl of questions in my brain echoing the green question marks on the physical monitors taped to his body in the hospital. Kean captures this rage of questions in the moment of loss. In her poem “At the Art Gallery After the Pandemic,” she asks,

How can the birds still sing?

Why doesn’t the sky rip and tear itself with mourning?

The questioning continues in “Beyond the Curtain” as she wonders about the division between the realms of the living and dead. The poet longs with “ferocious tenderness” to bridge this divide as she writes,

“and who else shares this air she breathes

Can the invisible curtain separating us be ripped?

How impenetrable this secret seems.

How elusive the knowing.”

The first of three sections of poems describes the upheaval of impending loss as her mother receives the diagnosis of the illness that ultimately takes her. Kean observes and records details with quiet precision. One gets the feeling that the process of observation serves as an anchor for her in moments of overwhelming sorrow. Yet nothing about this scrutiny feels removed or distant. In “Mom’s Last CT Scan,” she writes:

“airways black. Liquid like two grey half-moons

inside each lung invades soft darkness.

There is nothing soft

about severing—”

The poet continues to record her mother in hospice care, her dying, and the rituals of death. In the poem “Mom’s Body in Freefall,” she describes the dying process:

“Freed of land’s constraints, her river

is falling over the cliff, spreading out”

As she prepares herself to take on the burden of loss, readers will recognize and be moved by the vivid images that form her language of grief. Kean continues to seethe at the forces that are working to part her from her mother, as she writes:

“Under the roaring,

my voice rages

against rocks.

I must become an anvil

as the weight bears down”

 The poet doesn’t shy away from facing the body’s decline. In “The Three-Piece Suit,” she looks death bravely in the eyes as she observes, “The body releases fluid. Yes, I’m crying. / Yes, she soiled the diaper.” She refuses the ceremonials of death and asks, “Can we stop surrounding death with a black border?”

An elegy is more than a poem of mourning—it also lauds and honors the person who is mourned. In poems that that reveal the love glimmering behind her tears, Kean celebrates her father, his love of music, the unique marks and quirks that reveal his human moments. In “Ode to My Father,” she recalls how “his mouth puckered to whistle or jest” and in “At the Retirement Community I ask my Father to Whistle” she describes how “the Whistler’s notes soar through screen doors, / wriggle into sidewalk cracks” and “windows fly open in welcome.”   

The final section continues the process of working through grief. Kean turns to nature for comfort. The wonders of the universe connect her and her readers to mysteries bigger than the individual self. This poet practices an intensely personal spirituality as she brings her attention to the gifts of the natural world. In “Against this Drought,” she opens us to the juice and sensuality of the humble pear as she writes,

“white flesh of the ripe red Anjou

its sweet juice leaks onto the plate

salt on the zucchini leaches water

drought deprived my skin: removed my parents touch”

The reader can connect with this embodied grief and feel it in their own body. Solace comes from the outdoors as garden work becomes grief work. Grass, trees, night owl, hummingbird and thunder rise in support of the grieving heart in the poems. As a reader, this collection feels transformative working as it does to turn and turn through various stages of grief bringing one to wisdom, a place where reader and poet can come together to consider “the gift of sorrow,” a place where sorrow’s grip can be loosened, and grief can be exhaled quietly.

Yamini Pathak is the author of poetry chapbooks, Atlas of Lost Places (Milk and Cake Press) and Breath Fire Water Song (Ghost City Press). Nominated for Best New Poets by SWWIM and a finalist for Frontier Poetry’s Global Poetry Prize (South Asia), her poems have appeared in Sierra, Poetry Northwest, Waxwing, Tupelo Quarterly and elsewhere. Yamini has an MFA in Poetry from Antioch University, LA and has received support from VONA/Voices, Tin House, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and Vermont Studio Center. Born in India, she lives with her family in New Jersey.