Overview

W.H. Auden said about poetry: ""there is only one thing / that all poetry must do; it must praise all it can for being / and for happening."" For forty years, Robert Cording's poems have sought to praise a world that need not be, but is. His poems embrace what cannot be changed: that living brings us face-to-face with suffering and injustice, beauty and grace. From the start, his work has explored three questions: Why does it feel that life is ""good,"" even in the face of so much suffering and grief? How can he be grateful for what he has been given despite the almost daily onslaught of affliction and sorrow in the world? How, finally, can he not only embrace, but praise the opposing sides of what's possible: the utter grief and utter joy of being alive? In the words of poet Eamon Grennan, Cording is always ""transforming his naturalist's scrutiny of the world into moral interrogation, bringing to our attention, in poem after poem, 'the strangeness we were born to.'"" What's Possible: New and Selected Poems makes clear what many have long known: that Robert Cording is among his generation's finest poets, and that his work has been both deeply consistent and yet constantly evolving. Here is a poet both unsparing and generous, a voice that has always heeded Shakespeare's injunction to ""speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.""

Full Product Details

9781639822232

Table of Contents

Reviews

There are poets of praise and poets of lament, and Robert Cording is both of these. His primary mode of responding to the experience of life is to love it, to take what existence offers and let it burnish his words as his words burnish it back. ""[T]he sumac's heart-colored, incandescent glow, / / is like a lifetime compressed into a kiss,"" he writes. This book is full of such compressions; it can break your heart even as it beautifully sings. Mr. Cording is the real thing. -Robert Wrigley, author of The True Account of Myself as a Bird ""I live in the eye,"" Keats says, and so does Robert Cording, a poet of stunning beauty and observation. He also lives in the heart and mind, interrogating the limits of beauty, meditating on its power to enlarge our sympathies. Reading these poems written across a span of time inspires genuine awe-for their musical skill, their elegant meditation on time and faith, their unsparing self-reckoning, and ever-growing depth of insight drawn from soulful reading and living. This book is full-throated, grounded, and glorious in its devotion to what's possible, written by a poet who throughout his impressive career has married modesty and magnificence. -Betsy Sholl, author of As If a Song Could Save You

Author Information

Tab Content 6

Countries Available