Ocean of Clouds
Poems
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Ocean of Clouds
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Narrated by:
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Garrett Hongo
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By:
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Garrett Hongo
About this listen
In his fourth book of poems, award-winning poet Garrett Hongo sees coastlines and waters, skylines and ancestral lines for what they inspire and teach.
In a surpassingly beautiful collection of poems, with his characteristic long-lined, rolling music, Hongo is alert to the possibilities of individual moments of perception and grace in the landscapes of his life, whether waiting for a ferry in Balboa after a writing workshop (“An oil slick from a yacht . . . / Spread rainbows on the water, an aleph / curving toward us”) or hanging out and playing LPs with the late, great poet Michael Harper, or watching his daughter in the sun with a halo of messy twelve-year-old’s hair, or listening to the sea, which speaks to him in so many places: at the Wai‘ōpae Tidepools, at Cassis, at Divi Bay in Saint Martin, where, he tells us, “I thought of writing to the soul of Nâzim Hikmet, / saying loving a woman was like writing a book— / . . . it is love’s body on which you write a page of kisses . . .”
These poems of cloudy moons and sandstone cliffsides, the black glass of lava shattered into sands, waves surging, and stories of a poet’s gratitude for the journey he has made, come together to make a paean against forgetting.
©2025 Garrett Hongo (P)2025 Random House AudioCritic Reviews
“Garrett Hongo’s lifelong project is an act of reclamation. As you read through his work, both in poetry and prose, you can see him finding his way, claiming his heritage, or trying to, as he invents his own rituals and memorials, talking story, and trying to fill in this shoal of a family story line. . . . I consider him one of our most important practitioners of latter-day Romanticism—and this makes him the kind of American poet determined to make linkages, to create a continuity and tradition for himself. . . . Hongo has carefully imagined another kind of family dispersed across the globe, poets and fiction writers, but also artists of all kinds—jazz saxophonists, fresco painters, all those who try to serve what Wordsworth called ‘the beauty that was felt.’”—Edward Hirsch, The Heart of American Poetry