In the Kindness of Their Quiet

A Review of Margaret Kean’s Cleaving the Clouds

Margaret Kean’s first poetry chapbook, Cleaving the Clouds, takes the reader on a journey through both external and internal landscapes where grief, wonder, and the rituals of everyday living become meditations on the mysteries surrounding life and death. The poet’s acute observations of her surroundings and important events in her life, reveal what is underneath the façade of people and places, both familiar and not: “She had many buried cities inside her./ Only four were ever excavated./ The rest died with her.” (22) says the speaker in “Buried Cities” as she processes the death of her mother and reflects about the many layers of stories ––bodies–––underneath our cities, generations of people now gone, but still present in collective memory. 

The chapbook is divided in three parts preceded by epigraphs that are also short poems written by Kean. The first part addresses the loss of the poet’s mother, while the second part focuses on the figure of the father. The third part explores individual and collective loss during the global pandemic, as well as the idea of confronting one’s own mortality. All the poems are deeply connected to the natural world and the way it shapes the speaker’s experiences and the ways she navigates the world. 

Kean’s poems are full of rich and vibrant images grounded in place––the nursing home where her father spends the last part of his life, downtown Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay, among others––which allow for a tether as the poet processes the loss of both of her parents, twenty-seven days apart from each other. The images also serve as both containers for grief and sites of wonder. This creates tension between what is happening in the speaker’s life and an outside world that keeps moving and flowing, like in “The Flow of Tides,”

Inside the cove, the San Francisco Bay pulls back again, 

morning fog envelops surrounding foothills. 

Ruins of rusted ship parts stick out of wet sand, 

remnants from a Gold Rush shipwreck: a lost anchor, 

cracked rudder, hull broken and corroded. 

From a distance, one bent piece could be a man kneeling (45)

As the speaker observes the “rusted ship parts” that become visible when the tide recedes and tries to make sense of their shapes, she thinks about how the act of covering and uncovering these relics is like the way in which memory works, how some things come forth, unbidden, while others are seemingly forgotten. Everything is a reminder of death, of what is no more but keeps haunting with its impermanent presence: “I yearn for quiet/but grief keeps interrupting” (16) says the speaker in “White Noise.” These interruptions are at the heart of Kean’s beautiful poems, reminding us about the balancing act of being human, that even when pain seems to overwhelm all of our senses, other emotions like curiosity and even joy are possible. 

One instance where the speaker sheds light on her discomfort and how it relates to social norms and beliefs about death and dying is in the poem “The Three-Piece Suit,” about the mortician coming to her mother’s home to perform his duties. The speaker notices his formal attire and attitude,

At 3:30 in the morning the mortician shrugged into the jacket 

of his three-piece navy-blue suit as he stepped from the van. 

As though his suit made her death more palatable. As though 

the sheet he wrapped around her body could sanitize us 

from feeling. The covering of her face took our breath away (20).

The sanitizing of death, the covering of the body, cannot erase the physical experience of illness and the suffering of a person, the agonizing last moments for the dying and for the living witnesses, the body doing what it must at the very end, “Yes, I’m crying. /Yes, she soiled the diaper.” The poet compares our cultural disregard for grief to the way we get rid of litter, like the leaves we “rake/off asphalt, tuck into dustbins, put out on the street/for pickup” (20). But what has happened cannot be undone or unseen, even when everything surrounding the experience of death is geared towards a kind of erasure.

The title of the chapbook is revealing as well in more than one way. Cleaving the clouds seems to allude to opening a path towards the mystery of death, to perhaps reclaim what was lost and to reunite with our loved ones. But the verb to cleave, has more than one meaning. On the one hand it implies a splitting, a severance of something. On the other though, “to cleave to” means to stay close to someone or something. Even though the title suggests the former meaning, the poems, through memory and sensory details. seem to also suggest the latter in the sense that writing becomes a way to both remain close, but also, get closure.  

The poems about the mother focus on the last moments, how things that happen in daily life––like a hummingbird crashing against clear glass––remind the poet how “I feared to stroke the little body/after Mom’s heart stopped” (21). The poems that speak of the father, however, carry a different connotation, one where the father seems to come alive through memory, “His light refracted through us, sparks enlivened” and yet “in his winter his fuel/runs low” (26). The father poems alternate between his lively demeanor and the deterioration of his capacities as illness takes over. Even so, the father’s voice, the sounds of his whistling, are felt by the poet, who remembers with fondness how much he loved it,

Inhaling, 

his cheeks shape the air into carillon bells 

that ring clear and strong 

as they have since I was a child. 

I loop my arm through his. As we walk, 

he leans, and whistles: windows fly open in welcome (25).

As the poet asks her father to whistle in his retirement community, she delights in the changes the sound brings to the place, in people’s reactions, in her own delight, the physicality of sound and how it can change the vibrations as it seeps “into sidewalk cracks,” and “underneath shrubs” and even joins the fish in the koi pond. Later in the book, as the speaker is listening to Vivaldi’s Violin Concerto in A Minor while driving, she remembers how her father loved to conduct “everywhere: at dinner, on vacation, /from his seat at concerts. Brown eyes sparking/ with intense concentration” (31) and begins to do so herself. She recalls how she played classical music for him on his deathbed while crying. The poem becomes an homage where the speaker embodies her father’s favorite activity, where movement is remembrance and connection though sound and memory.

Towards the end of the collection, the poet’s emotions alternate between anger, sorrow, and longing, the desire to undo what has been done, to go back in time and see her loved ones, but also, to understand why things happen the way they do, how life keeps going when her internal world has been ripped apart,

How can birds still sing? 

Why doesn’t the sky rip and tear itself with mourning? (38).

The world becomes dream-like in a way. On the one hand, the poet relives important moments with her parents and considers her relationship with her own daughters. On the other, she cannot help but marvel at the workings of the universe, the deep layers of the unknown. These poems are necessary meditations for today’s chaotic world, a balm for difficult times.