Cloud Journal by David Rigsbee is a collection of two sonnet sequences. The first sequence, "Sonnets to Hamlet," narrates the tragedy of a fire in the Imperial Foods chicken processing plant in Hamlet, North Carolina, that killed twenty-five people. The second sequence, "Cloud Journal," is an extended meditation on place and perception. Rigsbee's book shows both his own mastery of this classical form and the potential of the form itself, to accommodate narrative and lyric with a contemporary voice.
From the Back Cover
"One can only hope a lot of people have time and leisure to experience poems as accomplished, multitudinous, complicated and evocative as these sonnets from David Rigsbee. Here, the technical difficulties are entirely invisible, the feeling and tone are unmistakably Elizabethan, and any true lover of poetry will be thankful for the experience. The collection begins with the most unlikely shove-off point it is possible to imagine for a poem--a fire in a chicken processing factory which killed many people unnecessarily, at a town named Hamlet, in North Carolina. With this as departure, Rigsbee is long gone into the empyrean and spins an epic out of a story as grisly as The Iliad. How he does it is a lesson in the power of poetic evocation. These sonnets move from the lowest human to the highest heavenly world."--Andrew Glaze
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