Cloudboy

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 naivety. 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.