Dennis Cooley, The Bestiary
Turnstone Press, 2020
Dennis Cooley, cold-press moon
Turnstone Press, 2020
Dennis Cooley, The Muse Sings
At Bay Press, 2020
The Bestiary is exactly what one might suspect it is, a collection of poems on prairie beasts. Set into themed sections—“‘A Prairie Boy’s Eden’,” “THE FROGS,” “THE CROW,” “THE SPIDER,” “ARKOLOGY” and “THE BIRDS”—Cooley composes a lyric in constant motion, play and wit and bad jokes, a lyric that refuses stillness; even while describing stillness, merely a pause before the poem turns, and darts away. “an old hen /barred / rock they called Hetty,” he writes, to open the poem “Hetty,” “Ms. Hen Rietta Lamour / and she was slow and lame // also dingy among / the persnickety birds / the hennaed chickens / that mince & fluff / in near disdain pick over the jewels [.]” Exploring his list of prairie beasts and childhood attentions and recollections, his lines bounce across pun and play, allowing the motion of language to propel where it might next land, bouncing off an idea or a fragment or a word stepping forth. The poems in The Bestiary are securely placed, set in prairie locale and language, among the sounds and stretched-out silences of the long prairie grasses and ahems, the patters of Cooley’s speech. “ttsskk tskk a grim taskmaster,” he writes, as part of the poem “is a victorian schoolmater,” “brisks to the ledge / one swift pass / sideswipes winter / / swipes the board clean [.]”
crow creates earth
scans
the mud
she
will call earth
wherever
she spits
saliva
glistens & pockmarks
crow watches the caribbean
turn electric blue
tilts on her toes
tints the days vermillion
smears them in
chartreuse in cyan in rust
fills in cobalt
& ochre indigo & goldenrod
adds woad &
madder slate & ruby
daubs cadmium
& manganese blue in burnt umber
in the coal-blue
cold crow compresses until
her heart becomes so
clear it cannot be
marked & will not break
gulps the raw new light
flings the stars over her shoulder
pins them onto the pewter moon
cries out when she turns
back hears the spinning
gasps when she sees the blue
& white world for the first time
so bright & wetly shining
Cooley takes an idea and runs with it, writing out any and every possible thing, exhausting every facet, ever play and pun through poems, eventually compiling and excising the excess into serviceable book-length form. My impression is that Cooley doesn’t build up into a book as much as pare down, pulling out from the larger structure the threads that make up individual book-length structures. One could think of his work-in-progress, “love in a dry land,” a collection first referenced through poems appearing in his Sunfall: new and selected poems (Toronto ON: House of Anansi Press, 1996) as well as in “the Dennis Cooley issue” of Prairie Fire magazine in 1998, a series of poems based on Sinclair Ross’s first novel, As For Me and My House (1941), composed from the point of view of the character of Mrs. Bentley. To date, the manuscript appears to have emerged not only as The Bentleys (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2006), but of the collection published prior to that, Country Music: New Poems (Vernon BC: Kalamalka Press, 2004). Might there be further collections that emerge from that particular manuscript?
The ways in which Cooley constructs a book around a subject or idea does seem a bit more expansive than in previous collections, but that could easily be something that has developed over his decades of book-making, from his long poem about his late father, Fielding (Thistledown Press, 1983), writing outer space and astronauts in This Only Home (Turnstone Press, 1992), writing his late mother through the poems in Irene (Turnstone Press, 2000), Bram Stoker’s Dracula and other vampire tales in seeing red (Turnstone Press, 2003) or the physical bones and lines of the prairie in the stones (Turnstone Press, 2013). And of course, there was his expansive writing and reworking of the histories and legends of Manitoba outlaw John Krafchenko in Bloody Jack (Turnstone Press, 1984; University of Alberta Press, 2002), a collection influenced, in part, through his experience with Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (House of Anansi Press, 1970). Bloody Jack is also a book that Cooley famously reworked and rewrote for the updated edition with University of Alberta Press, including returning a number of pieces and pages originally removed by editor David Arnason from the original publication (the difference between the 138 pages of the first edition, and the 280 pages of the second).
a lyric moon
clear as acrylic
the stepmother
moves like wasps wraps the children in
wire ties up the
tongues she warps and ensnares them
they can hardly
walk barely talk their father does not
know what they say
they are mute fall down without
reason the father
tries to warn them warm them with
his voice she is
taking away the words taking them
under her spell children
children speak to me the father
is nearly worn out
fears she will draw them in they will
stumble back into
infancy into the forests dead to the
father and he pleads
for them come back come back to the
house where their
stories are stacked like blankets they
can wrap around
themselves but now they drag animal
shouts through
their throats under the big O that rolls
overhead in
circles and circe howls
Asks of frogs in spandex swimsuits
they snap at their waists
proud of their wars and waterlines.
Dunno, dunno.
Nope, no kids
round these parts mister. Yustabe but no
kids no more. Nope.
(“THE FOREST,” cold-press moon)
Cooley has a way of arriving at the bare bones of a story, of an idea, writing landscape or folk tales of lost children and stepmothers, and what moves out beyond the shadows. He even includes a sly reference to his friend, David Arnason, who wrote out two volumes, subtitled “fractured prairie tales,” of own short stories reworking fables and myths, both of which appeared through Turnstone Press: The Dragon And The Dry Goods Princess (1994) and If Pigs Could Fly (1995). As part of the piece “THE FATHER CONFERS WITH THE QUEEN,” a poem composed as part of a stretch of lyrics around the fable of the princess and the frog, Cooley writes out the queen, who speaks: “No, I simply will not hear this. That wonderful / Mr. Arnason know who knows all about these things from his / days at Gimli says he’s quite remarkable at the pool, a fine / young swimmer. A natural. And that is the end of it. I / will not hear another word.” There is something so compelling in the way his poems push, propelled by sound, ideas and image, endlessly pushing alternates and versions, such as the poem “GARRISON MENTALITY,” the first poem of the section “Rapunzel,” that begins: “awful the way you keep me // waiting why lady chat / elaine why do you do this / you into your curds & why // i send my feathered love / the shafts of light shift & sing / they ring & splinter against / your bedroom door [.]” Cooley writes so much around the core of a story, weaving an endless array of other threads and thoughts, composing poems as fragments, facets of the whole, set entirely in tandem with the rest of the collection, potentially incomplete outside of the larger manuscript.
always the blue
mirror the Queen leaves behind
knows she will
leave behind
her beauty squeezed
like a lemon
The mirror is an
egg, gold-framed. It could be a compact
the Queen opens to
catch or chalk her face. The hinges
shut with a chunk
like a per cutter.
She begins to feel she is limestone.
Mirror mirror she
says who is and who is not the mirror
the minor who in
all the land is? Who the most of all?
She has made a
compact with someone on the other side
of silver, whose
light & shadow move quick as spiders.
There, the mirror should
have said.
Look into the
mirror.
It is you. (“MIRROR,”
“Snow White”)
There are such lovely flows and subtle shifts, from writing “lyre lyre pants on fire,” or even the title of the section that fragment rests within, the tenth and penultimate section of cold-press moon, “By the River Sticks.” The final section, also, including the delightful fragment: “you say what i say / is what i say you say // till everything is /rubbery from talk” (“IT’S OUR SLINKY WAY OF WALKING”). I am curious as to the final section of the collection, “Once Bitten,” that writes around Bram Stoker’s Dracula, especially given Cooley dedicated an entire poetry collection, seeing red, around the same character. One might ask what ground he would consider left uncovered from that prior collection, but, knowing a bit about Cooley’s work, I would wonder, instead, if that project prompted this (or vice versa). It suggests, possibly, that seeing red and cold-press moon are either sibling collections, or even part of the same larger project. “once bitten by poetry,” he writes, as part of the poem “LISTEN,” “your whole neck / aching with effort [.]” And why are so many of the lyrics of this cold-press moon populated with frogs? He hints at multiple, sly princes nestled across his fabled prairie, all of whom are hidden in plain sight. The poem ends:
you want to say
some thing
your throat is
shouting but
you do not know
what to do
there is no
one to listen to
one to care
The idea of the muse is something that has cropped up in numerous pieces of by Cooley over the years, writing poems around the act of writing as well as directly to the reader, so it is curious to see a full collection moving through those ideas in The Muse Sings. As part of such, two-thirds of the acknowledgments for this collection emerge from prior collections—his travel journal Passwords: Transmigrations between Canada and Europe (Kiel, Germany: l&fVerlag, 1996) and poetry collection Soul Searching (Red Deer AB: Red Deer College Press, 1987)—seemingly pulling earlier of his own poems out of one context and setting them down into another. Or perhaps, instead, and again, these are jumping-off points, allowing him to further explore what he had merely touched upon in those earlier works. The Muse Sings is a collection of poems for and after other writers, writing almost as an extension of the work from his Dedications (Thistledown Press, 1988), writing out those in his reading and writing vicinity. As he writes to open “the poet loves her machines,” a poem “for Nicole Markotić,” “loves the way / the printer / clicks in dismay or in pleasure moves / its arm / seeks permission [.]”
poetry: the ins
and outs of
have added glowing
rubrics
and placed in the
margins
small and
exquisite notes
a red letter day
in strange
languages
something shows
through
to put a shine on
who’d
have thought
would
be our undoing
houdini
inside the lines
drawn
in ropes and chains
incandescent
with moving
would surely have
listened
and spoken with
the dead
These three titles, read and published simultaneously in the same publishing season, present a curious triptych of Cooley’s range and stretch of concerns writing out the prairie landscape, memory, breath and perspective. He writes in the tradition of the Canadian long poem, but one that is presented as accumulation and exhaustive study through the form of a prairie lyric engaged with play and pun, propelled by sound, meaning and language, and set squarely in a blend of the real and the mythic prairie. Cooley has, over the years, composed prairie lyrics less a sequence of book-projects than a prairie life-long lyric; what bpNichol termed a ‘poem as long as a life.’ And one might suspect that this lyric will long outlive him, also. One might even suspect there will be far more to see.
