Cloud Vigil
Cloud Vigil
Thembe Mvula
Paperback
Pre-order now: for delivery October 2026
Cloud Vigil explores grief as a doorway to a changed reality, searching for new ground in the wake of love, loss and uncertainty. Attempts to get over an ex sit alongside the silences imposed by death, while surrealism, humour and musicality carry the poems between the abstract and the tangible: the body, domestic spaces, family memory and the natural world.
Moving through different places, times and modes of reality, these poems turn moments of stillness in nature and urban life into lenses for examining interior experience and the lives of others. Their forms share that sense of fluidity, shifting between playfulness and contemplation, nostalgia and hope. Cloud Vigil is an intimate, discerning collection that casts light on the major and minor moments that make us human, making even the most difficult acts of looking feel bearable and gentle.
Couldn't load pickup availability
Imprint: Valley Press
Published: October 2026
ISBN: 9781915606938
Catalogue no: VP0281
Page count: 48
Trim size: 216 x 138 mm
View full details
Praise for Cloud Vigil:
“Mvula’s poems live in the uneasy territory between tenderness and damage, love that won’t behave, grief that keeps changing shape … There is warmth here, but never quite comfort.”
— Rachel Long
“Thembe Mvula renders the world anew with each glance, attentively balancing the beauty of renewed wonder with the tenderness of old grief.”
— Victoria Adukwei Bulley
“Cloud Vigil has a restless energy and momentum, evident as much in the variety of forms as in its phrasing … Mvula’s poems praise with a clear-sighted candour.”
— Jamie McKendrick
“Rich with language that manages to shout and whisper at the same time. A beautiful meditation on grief, love, and all the places – real and imagined – in between.”
— Bridget Minamore
“Cloud Vigil … offers a tender room for remembrance, love, and the liminal spaces in-between. These poems not only bend realities, they are musings capturing grief, nature and loneliness, crafted with care.”
— Yomi Ṣode
“Taut and tender ... written with an accessible yet precise eye. A strong collection from a vital voice.”
— Inua Ellams
About the author
Thembe Mvula is a South African/British poet and storyteller whose work explores love, belonging, Black and migrant memory, and the ways we heal. An alum of the Obsidian Foundation, Barbican Young Poets and the Roundhouse Poetry Collective, she has performed nationally and internationally at venues and festivals including Tate Modern, Oslo Afro Arts Festival, Latitude and Dublin Book Festival.
Her self-published debut pamphlet, We That Wither Beneath, was shortlisted for the Melita Hume Poetry Prize and named a Poetry School Book of the Year in 2019. Her poetry has appeared in POETRY, Propel and Magma Poetry, and in anthologies including Part of a Story That Started Before Me (Penguin Random House), Before Them, We (flipped eye publishing) and Black Anthology (10:10 Press). She holds an MSt in Creative Writing from the University of Oxford, where she specialised in screenwriting.