Cloud Soup

A delightfully charming collection, covering a broad range of topics, and keeping at its core a sense of wonder in the everyday. Wakeling has a playfulness with words that is so engaging; the figurative language is second to none, as with the titular kennings for rain (“cloud soup, sky spittle, the puddle artist”). Her poems are technically sound, with thorough exploration of form, and a healthy dose of silliness – in ‘Paean’, for example, a garden pea is described, among other things, as a “trainee lime”.

Demonstrates wonderful cohesion between the poems and Brasliņa’s illustrations – there is a lightness, rather than a literalness, to the accompanying images. A skilful exhibition of complex simplicity, contained in a beautifully produced, pocket-sized package.

Cloud Soup has been shortlisted for the CLiPPA 2022.

Special discount on books from the CLiPPA shortlist 2022 from Peters Books