Cloud Builder (The National Poetry Series)

What do we owe the dead? This is the question at the heart of Cloud Builder, in which Weston Morrow interrogates the burden of legacy and the ever-watchful gaze of our deceased loved ones. His search takes him from the landscapes of the late Romantics to the soccer fields and baseball diamonds of present-day Washington state, along the way reanimating figures from his own and our collective past. These poems reawaken long-dead painters and musicians, collapsed bridges, derelict ferries, and dormant volcanoes, confronting him with his failure, at times, to ask what it is we owe the living. What do the dead want from us? Or, conversely, is it we who haunt “the past, who can’t stop turning back / for one last look”?