Collected
Poems, David Cooke
Littoral
Press, 2023
‘Poetry in my opinion must be honest before anything else and I refuse to be ‘objective’ or clear-cut at the cost of honesty’—Louis MacNeice
In an interview first published in Agenda, and reprinted at the back of this book, Cooke tells Patricia McCarthy, ‘I have never been what you might call “fashionable”. So if I have any claim to authenticity, it probably stems from this.’ And in a translation of a Constantine Cavafy poem he writes that ‘he has not courted the world’. His verse is intelligent, expansive, wide ranging, and philosophical. Among his principal themes are his Irish roots; music (blues, jazz); existential angst (his lapsed Catholicism)—complemented by a spirit of ‘homelessness’, both literal and existential; his extensive travels; and a profound love of family. However, despite being the recipient of a Gregory Award (in 1977, remarkably while still an undergraduate at Nottingham University), as well as an accomplished man of letters, he still views himself as an outsider.
It is tempting to label him Irish, but while Cooke’s spiritual roots may be in the west of Ireland, where his parents hailed from and where he spent childhood holidays, he grew up in Reading, and is not too fussed when it comes to nationality (‘England / Ireland: it’s one life’, he writes in ‘After Hours’, no 16). He is as at home in continental Europe, and indeed beyond, as he is in Ireland or the U.K. Clearly, he absorbed Seamus Heaney; John Montague and Derek Mahon are influences as well, as are English greats such as Ted Hughes and Thomas Gunn. He is also versed in Baudelaire and Proust, but his voice is very much his own. He relishes the well crafted thing, a poem that makes a clear point and he is fascinated by structure and word choice. But notwithstanding his own considerable erudition, he is a grave and exacting craftsman and displays an innate distrust of the highfalutin and the self indulgent. As he puts it in his poem on the Occitan troubadour Arnaut Daniel, he feels, keenly, the necessity of weighing ‘the pennyweights of syllables / rising, falling and reaching the end’—his ‘verses planed and filed’, ‘vowels / and consonants marshalled / in a strict, enduring music.’ And in ‘Poets’ Wives’ (dedicated to Heaney), he lauds the deceased Nobel laureate for his ‘assiduous care of the word.’
The publication of Cook’s debut, Bruegel’s Dancers (1984), marked the emergence of a unique and exciting voice in Irish and British letters. A master of the short lyric (although there are a number of longer poems, written in sections), many of his poems, especially the earlier ones, are rooted in his experience of visiting family in Swinford, County Mayo, and find their germ in the characters, words and deeds of his grandparents and his parents—who migrated to England in the ‘50s. Often the speaker seems to view his surroundings from behind a pane of strangeness; he is at once outsider and insider. On early visits to Ireland, in the poem ‘Cows’, he describes seeing Freisans, Shorthorn and Angus cows ‘From the compartment Windows’ of a passing train as ‘fake’, but when he sits and milks cows under his grandfather’s supervision, he is transported back to ancient Ireland:
…a white jet steamed
frothed up in a galvanized pail.
The fields outside
were full of their muck
in pats that were ringed
and perfect. Wherever
I ran, that muck
would cling to my shoes.
Religion is also explored in many of these poems, but if he describes his waked father as ‘…at rest like a saint's, / no awkward warmth or gruffness remained / to stir its cloistered calm,’ for Cooke the religion he was raised on is a ‘long abandoned language’—something which causes him a certain level of guilt, if not foreboding. Further along in his interview with Patricia McCarthy, he states: ‘Without wanting to sound too angst-ridden, I do suspect that a sense of alienation or ‘homelessness’ is part of my psychic landscape’:
A gathered clan we stood, each lost
in a separate silence
until the drone of a rosary began.
Like a long abandoned language
its monotone rose, familiar, to beat against
bare walls: a cycle of mysteries
that couldn’t explain or change a thing.
Coupled with his loss of faith, due in part to his reading of Camus and Sartre (‘…my God had wandered off / to a wilderness glimpsed in the prose / of Sartre, or the never-ending byways / of Beckett’s stumbling purgatory’), as well as the rural Irish paradise of his youth, a sense of homelessness, both geographical and metaphysical, informs a number of poems Cooke wrote in the 1980s. ‘Connacht’ (‘knowing now that Eden / is only a fierce nostalgia’) is one, as is ‘Travellers’, a poem about outsiders in Ireland—‘tinkers’, as they were once known—but also the speaker and his younger brother, Martin, easily identifiable by their English accents. ‘On the Front’ is another poem which equates ‘homelessness’ with loss of faith, and the short poem ‘Slow Blues’ concludes: ‘This is the poetry / of a studious youth, its song nudged by dissonance / toward those cleansed horizons – the mythic home of the dispossessed.’ Ultimately, the Ireland of the poet’s childhood exists now only in his imagination: ‘There is no way back / to that landscape / or the child / that you once were. / The well is boarded up / The Iron Age fort / bulldozed flat.’ (‘Jonesforth’.)
‘The Teatime Bulletin’ opens with the line ‘It’s early evening and the TV is on:’ the domestic scene of rowdy children and dinner making is interrupted by news of slaughter in a distant land, and Cooke’s domestic cares are erased by the bleak knowledge that his problems are mundane compared to the plight of those living with the horror of war:
In a sealed-off quarter of a dusty city
bodies lie where heat is hazing –
a postcard prospect with trees
and benches, a straggle of shops
that frames the square, its dry air
cracks to a dull staccato
as hours away in that glimmering
focus events wash like waves
along a brittle shore.
The faces there are representative,
their features blurred to a cipher, and the dead
rot, unclaimed, slumped in a final statement.
The collection is an extraordinarily assured debut, and the last three poems in it, ‘Montesquieu’, ‘The St Kildans’ and ‘An Elegy for Charlie Parker’—the latter written in rhymed verse—are eminently quotable and deserve to be widely anthologized.
The subsequent volumes revisit, and sometimes re-envision, his earlier years and his adolescence, and interspersed among fine sequences of travel poems are many pieces dedicated to family. ‘My Grandson Writes his Name’ is a moving poem, there is also a poem about his Catholic upbringing (which taught him ‘a medieval rigour of mind’ and ‘a taxonomy of virtues/and vices’), his schooling (raised on ‘great slabs/of Virgil’), his years in Reading and Grimsby, and his love of domesticity (gardening, home improvement, shopping, cooking, raising his children, stamp-collecting and bird-watching with his son). A number of the poems examine his relationship with his grandparents (‘Down’, ‘Fenians’, ‘Visiting’, ‘Easter 1966’, ‘Respects’); his mother (‘Songs He Sang Her’, ‘The Leaving Cert’, ‘Lives of the Saints’); his wife, Bernadette (‘Empty Nests’); sister, Belinda (‘Epilogue’, ‘The Bronze Horseman'); and daughter, Anna (‘On My Daughter’s Conversion’). Others commemorate his brothers Paul (‘The Night Out’, ‘Poem for Paul’) and Martin (Travellers’, ‘Postcript: How A Heart Breaks’); and at least one piece is dedicated to his father-in-law, John (‘Going Home’). But perhaps the most compelling, revealing and poignant poems (at least twenty-five of them) in this Collected are inspired by his father—an intriguing, witty, multifaceted and often contradictory figure, a navvy who made good but died tragically young, aged 56, after a building site accident. Two excerpts will suffice to give us a flavour of the influence he exerted on his eldest son:
The steel doors slammed forlornly.
We were on the road once more.
If I closed my eyes I imagined
we’d make it to the next frontier,
when all we did was land
on a creeping new estate
where, opening up those doors again,
my gaffer showed me the light.
(From ‘Working Holidays’)
A wary mentor,
his maxims surfaced
through the burr
of his brogue –
‘Just live kind of right
and go to Mass ...’
until, after all
those sullen Sundays –
‘It might be bollocks,
but at least you'll always
meet some people!’
(‘The Advice’)
Cooke is also obsessed with travel and languages. He has a reading knowledge of Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, German, French, Russian, Latin, Greek, Italian, and Irish—languages he has studied substantially over the years—in addition to a smattering of Polish and Spanish. He claims his love of languages comes from his early years studying Latin, as well as Irish, which he describes as his ‘ancestral languages.’ Two of the finest poems in the book are ‘For Ned Maddrel,’ dedicated to the last Manx speaker—an epitaph for a ‘dead’ language (although the language is believed to be currently making a modest revival in the Isle of Man)—and the deeply moving ‘Learning Irish’. Despite quoting Kingsley Amis’s observation that ‘Nobody wants any more poems about foreign cities,’ Cooke includes a whole bunch. While this may not be everybody’s cup of tea, his craft never falters. He is no swanning flâneur, either, but sees beneath the neon lights, the palm tres and the outwardly exotic the often terrifying reality of modern times: ‘A dirty war drags on, each merciless surge / in the field bringing terror home / to hot preoccupied streets, where spotless / children grow fearful of their buses.’ (‘Colombo’).
The book concludes with a series of masterful, subtly rendered translations of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Ó Díreáin, Ó Ríordáin, Pasternak, Pessoa, Rilke and Supervielle. The gold standard for poetry in translation is that the versions in the target language do not sound like translations, and in this case Cooke has more than made them his own. Poets whose work have been straitjacketed in the often wooden, uninspired verse of previous translators emerge fresh, vital and vibrant in Cooke’s thoughtful and carefully crafted versions. Weighing in at 493 pages of poems and translations culled from nine volumes, Collected Poems represents 40 years of exemplary toil in the vineyard of the word. Upon first looking into it, I thought, This is a major voice. Why have I not heard about him before this? For my money, David Cooke is up there with any contemporary poet writing in English, and it is a crying shame that he is not more widely known.
Colin Carberry was born in Toronto but raised in the Irish Midlands. His work has appeared in numerous journals, newspapers and anthologies worldwide (Poetry Ireland Review, Exile: The Literary Quarterly, The Irish Times, Reforma, Jailbreaks: 99 Canadian Sonnets, El Norte, and Život) and in three poetry collections, and his poems have been translated into many languages. His Selected Poems, Ghost Homeland (Scotus Press, Dublin), was translated into Bangla and published in Kolkata, India, in June 2024.
