The Sky Weeps with Us by Laurel S. Peterson

Loved ones die, but they don’t usually do it in rapid succession on the eve of a pandemic. After a while what can you do but shake your head in disbelief; witness these back-to-back titles: “And Then Frank,” “And Another.” Nature, that universal provider of solace, isn’t doing so well itself: the fog won’t lift, the rains won’t come, the concrete birdbath is shedding chunks of itself. Peterson’s quiet narrator feels the wallop of grief every which way. She also honors each lost friend and relative with a short, blessedly unsentimental prose portrait, and then she picks herself up, and prevails. I will turn again to these crystalline poems with gratitude and pleasure whenever my own losses threaten to knock me down.

–Michele Herman, author of Save the Village, Just Another Jack and Victory Boulevard.

THE SKY WEEPS WITH US, Laurel Peterson’s latest book of poems, gently caresses its readers into a soft trance with carefully observed moments of simple beauty and quiet, everyday events. A squirrel, the fog, museums, artwork—all are delicately painted in quick, deft strokes that allow her readers to grab onto a perfectly phrased image. That description might make this book sound like a sweet little collection of verse, but it is anything but that. Peterson lulls us into that trance only to surprise us with a devastating punch to the face. Sometimes the punch feels thunderous and huge, while at other times it has the precision and sharp pain of an unexpected dagger. The mundane and mortal meet in these poems with the pandemic and deaths of loved ones always lurking in the background. At times, the delicate grief Peterson depicts is almost too painful to bear as she loses her father, worries about her husband’s health, and contemplates her own aging and mortality. Perhaps her poems are best summed up by a line in “Prayer”: “even barrenness / shows her beauty / when caressed by beams.” The light Peterson shines on her scenes is not a blinding spotlight, but it is enough to give us necessary moments of simple grace in a world where grief is never ending.

–Rick Magee, Poet Laureate of Bethel, author of Green Latitudes

Laurel Peterson’s haunting chapbook is a lyrical account of people disappearing—removed from the world as if by magic. The poems are exquisitely rendered—we notice the squirrels, the sounds of vehicles on the road, a well-stocked pantry. The people in these poems can no more comprehend death than we, the reader, and The Sky Weeps with Us deftly replicates that disorientation and denial. Everything is ephemeral, precarious in these poems. Each text message is in danger of being the last. The fog could seemingly eat a person whole and never spit them out. Throughout these meditations on grief, the mundane nature of death and its incomprehensibility is nimbly woven into the everyday, with the shadow of COVID lockdown looming large. Maybe we all are the crumbling artifact in “Filling the Birdbath,” with “thirty years of soft feathers/fluttering in its mouth at twilight.” All who have grieved will find comfort in this collection. The questions in the poems echo in all of us. And maybe in that questioning there is communion. In the closing poem “How to Grieve,” the speaker acknowledges the double edge to grief. It is sharp in contrast to “. . . gratitude,/ that generosity toward the world . . .”

–Emily Hockaday, author of Blood Music and In a Body