Description
Book SynopsisIn Mars Poetica, Wyn Cooper explores the conscious and unconscious ways we comprehend both the world around us and the one inside. From subjects like fashion, film, music, and painting, to more solemn and universal themes such as desire, anxiety, and loss, Cooper shows how such disparate topics can mirror each other in ways that help us to illuminate our lives. Employing various styles, forms, and sensibilities, Cooper’s poems both celebrate and mourn, as a means of illustrating the necessity for maintaining equilibrium in an increasingly unbalanced world.
Trade ReviewPraise for Mars Poetica: “From the opening words of Mars Poetica, Wyn Cooper creates for us nothing less than a manual for memory. The word “reverie” punctuates these poems, and no wonder! For in this book, Cooper wanders and dreams whole continents, the pattern of a skirt, a song no longer playing, lost friends, former homes, spent years. What will we miss the most when we have left Earth? Everything Cooper gives us here and more.” —Kathy Fagan “Wyn Cooper’s poems are cold compresses for the inflamed mind. They calm and refresh with their clarity and lucidity; their music soothes and enlivens; their intelligence and their sure craft sustain us and confirm our faith in art. They are a perfect antidote for the fevers of our historical moment.” —Vijay Seshadri ""There is a staccato quality to Wyn Cooper’s poetry that I admire, as if the words have been pried out of him. The poems’ brevity and their short phrases become telegraphic; they give his language a sense of urgency. But nothing is hurried. The poems move forward thoughtfully and gracefully, as they bear witness to the world’s fragility and to Mr. Cooper’s own."" —Stephen Dobyns
Table of ContentsContents " Mars Poetica " " The Kind of Rain 8 This Lightness Plaza de Toros Viral Movement Lifeboat This Train The Next New Thing 15 Rosemary’s Babies 16 Angels My Idea What I Might Have Done 19 II How Silent the Trees 21 Hurricane Pity Quake Pulse Drummer Sort it Out Mixup at the Speakeasy 28 Her Measured Fall 29 Gravity Counting The Loneliest Road in America 32 III Collected Works 34 Needles and Haste 35 Vectors Gunfire Intense Death of the Cool 39 Tread Lightly Harvest Moon Trapped in a Decade Long Gone 42 She Erased His Mouth 43 Alaska Pirated Debris IV Abstraction Drinking the Stars 49 Menu Parade Three Loves Flow Belief The Watcher Documents Film Starboard The Road Ends Here 59 Acknowledgments 60 Thank You About the Author 62
