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Cloudbreak
poetry
Unknown Binding
Published January 1, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 18, 2021
There is alchemy going on in "Cloudbreak," turning memories and experiences into a kind of gold. Full disclosure: Heather Estes has done two readings for my book group, I know her personally, so I'm naturally inclined to appreciate both of her volumes of poetry. But you do not need to meet her in person to enjoy her poetry's undeniable, unpretentious charm. As she transitioned from a demanding, sometimes dangerous, always fulfilling professional position, into private life, she used her verses to process the past and appreciate the present. Her sense of family and her sense of place have been essential components of her outlook as she transcends the normal resentments that tend to trip us up during transitions: "Our feelings rise with memory and gratitude./Poetry leaks out of our fingers."
June 25, 2021
Poets can evoke memory and feeling in a few words, while essays and novels take pages to do the same. Heather Saunders Estes poems in “Cloudbreak” speak of memory, relationships, reflections on the past and dreams for the future in poems that evoke contemplation by the reader of their own lives.
In “Memory” and “Bendiction” Estes uses brief shared moments with her father to subtly depict their bond. She explores motherhood and the understanding of her mother that it has given her. In “Settling an Old Score” I recognize my conflicted feelings about my mother’s pressure to direct my life. Estes puts it perfectly but lovingly:
I accept what you gave me,
both dark and bright.
She describes the complex nature of an enduring relationship in “The Long marriage” with honesty and tenderness and brilliantly captures the sensuality in that marriage in “We Rearrange Entwined Blankets”. At the same time, she doesn’t gloss over the work it takes to hold a relationship together. In “I Love you”:
We walk well-worn paths,
unspoken guard rails
spanning the depth and the distance
between our rocky walls.
Holding hands we step together
into rushing streams
together, for worse or better.
Heather Saunders Estes spent 37 years at Planned Parenthood and as CEO led it as it became the major resource of reproductive health care for men and women in the Bay Area and beyond. On retirement she returned to her early love, poetry writing, and in this new book of poems she reflects on her past, on this moment of change and on the challenge of charting a new course in life. In “Estivation” during Covid sheltering she ponders the transition from one vocation to another:
I am gestating
towards a personal rebirth
as outside my burrow
the wintered world rages.
I am quiet, by myself.
Not just in my bedroom like Emily,
but sharing a limited palette of colors
so new shapes emerge without distraction
The poems in “Cloudbreak” are thoughtful and make the reader reflect. In between poems about the past, relationships and change are lyrical descriptions of nature, San Francisco in the mist, the sounds of nature, the shifting light of a day. Estes’ moments of tranquility become the reader’s, breathing room in which to contemplate as she has done.
In “Memory” and “Bendiction” Estes uses brief shared moments with her father to subtly depict their bond. She explores motherhood and the understanding of her mother that it has given her. In “Settling an Old Score” I recognize my conflicted feelings about my mother’s pressure to direct my life. Estes puts it perfectly but lovingly:
I accept what you gave me,
both dark and bright.
She describes the complex nature of an enduring relationship in “The Long marriage” with honesty and tenderness and brilliantly captures the sensuality in that marriage in “We Rearrange Entwined Blankets”. At the same time, she doesn’t gloss over the work it takes to hold a relationship together. In “I Love you”:
We walk well-worn paths,
unspoken guard rails
spanning the depth and the distance
between our rocky walls.
Holding hands we step together
into rushing streams
together, for worse or better.
Heather Saunders Estes spent 37 years at Planned Parenthood and as CEO led it as it became the major resource of reproductive health care for men and women in the Bay Area and beyond. On retirement she returned to her early love, poetry writing, and in this new book of poems she reflects on her past, on this moment of change and on the challenge of charting a new course in life. In “Estivation” during Covid sheltering she ponders the transition from one vocation to another:
I am gestating
towards a personal rebirth
as outside my burrow
the wintered world rages.
I am quiet, by myself.
Not just in my bedroom like Emily,
but sharing a limited palette of colors
so new shapes emerge without distraction
The poems in “Cloudbreak” are thoughtful and make the reader reflect. In between poems about the past, relationships and change are lyrical descriptions of nature, San Francisco in the mist, the sounds of nature, the shifting light of a day. Estes’ moments of tranquility become the reader’s, breathing room in which to contemplate as she has done.
April 5, 2023
Heather Saunder Estes’ Cloudbreak poetry is full of nature, movement, images and landscape; but is more narrative sketches and “occasional poems.” She has a very direct, comfortable, talky, first person style; beautifully crafted, in which she is very visible, audible and confident; even when expressing envy (“Giraffe”), “I Take the Subway to My Therapist,” atomic bomb fear in a Cold War childhood (“Cans of Baked Beans”) and a view in “San Francisco, 14th Avenue.”
The expanse of ocean
is in perpetual conversation
with the mutable sky.
Her inscription page says a lot in a little, “For Mom and Dad, Thank you for sharing your love of words, curiosity, rebellion, and justice.” And the last two lines of “Elegy for a Chief Executive Officer” after she was “37 years as a Planned Parenthood CEO,”
I was a culture warrior.
I came home alive.
Even the pensive poems are very grounded, self-assured and detailed; often going back and forth in time with the same thought, persons or place; but coming back to center between loss and curiosity to contentment, wholeness.
Beautiful, in a real, real way.
The expanse of ocean
is in perpetual conversation
with the mutable sky.
Her inscription page says a lot in a little, “For Mom and Dad, Thank you for sharing your love of words, curiosity, rebellion, and justice.” And the last two lines of “Elegy for a Chief Executive Officer” after she was “37 years as a Planned Parenthood CEO,”
I was a culture warrior.
I came home alive.
Even the pensive poems are very grounded, self-assured and detailed; often going back and forth in time with the same thought, persons or place; but coming back to center between loss and curiosity to contentment, wholeness.
Beautiful, in a real, real way.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews