Passerine by Kirsten Luckins

Clouds shape-shift, hang, yield, blacken, burst, ever-changeable. Clouds emanate our feelings, so cloud-gazing takes on a formless act of poetry.

I read Passerine, Kirsten Luckins' third collection, on a cloudy day beside my kitchen window and learn that passerines are perching birds, distinguished by the shape of their toes. The perching bird, like the poet.

Passerine opens as an elegy: Sophie Cannet 1975 - 2016, followed by a series of letters, all addressed to her. A posthumous act, of writing to someone who will not reply.

These epistolary poems are dated through the seasons, starting in the summer months, through autumn, winter and spring. They gently probe at the poet's loss, all year round, written-down in observations of clouds. The passerine's grief manifest, perching still. 

Quiet memories of Sophie are always interchangeable with clouds. 

On July 10th, it is her hair, prematurely grayed in illness:

The Clouds today are the last few sweepings

from an old ladies' hair salon

...

Your hair would have been a pennant today,

...

But as the letters move into the wintry months, grief starts to consume them. On October 20th, everything breaks apart loosely forming one word: 

clouded. 

This repeats and disfigures over and over, across the page. A visual play, clouded letters, feelings strewn out:

c        l      o     u    d       e   d

          c      l      o   u    d      e

d               c      l        o        u

...

By December 10th, the passerine's grief is almost too much. It becomes:

the thing that lurches / through the back of my head. 

Then language breaks down. A page that further abstracts this bottomless feeling, of missing someone you love. Nowhere - there is no text, just a big black square eating up all the space around it. 

I turn the page again, slowly this time because I have to. I tuck away the black square, and read the poet's slow return to words:

...

How I feel is, I feel, quite resistant to speech.

...

It feels hopeless, except the act of writing itself. The clouds are still being observed and spring comes after all. By April 2nd, a telegraph interrupts the letters, and it is from the clouds:

The clouds telegraph TATTY SPRING IS HERE STOP

Slowly, grief eases, the passerine still perched. The poet makes peace with the seasons, though the world may still be in turmoil, death is put aside for a moment. 

By May 30th:

What more can I possibly tell you?

A cyclic ending then, into the earthy lush. The poet grieves, the letters stop, and clouds pass overhead.

Simply knowing.