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The co-op bookstore for avid readers
Blue Window: Poems by Deborah Gordon Cooper
Deborah Cooper's poetry delivers healing compassion, bringing readers into a landscape of solace and renewal.
Dark clouds this morning
casting shadows on the waves
and still the birds sing,
one of sorrow, two of grace.
Granted a residency at the Cill Rialaig Artists Retreat in County Kerry, Ireland, Deborah looked out from the loft of a stone cottage through a blue-framed window as she crafted a number of the poems collected in this volume.
Yet even as she sometimes describes the world through a lens of grief (Deborah began writing when she was a hospice chaplain), this collection includes many new works on the theme of light returning after a night of solitary wakefulness.
"Marked by breath and memory, by the holiness of ordinary things, each page opens windows to a world of empathetic light."
(Kimberly Blaeser, Wisconsin Poet Laureate 2015-16)
Blue Window is Cooper's sixth volume of poetry, following Under the Influence of Lilacs (Clover Valley Press, 2010). Her poems appeared in two collections by her writing group of twenty years, including Bound Together: Like the Grasses (Clover Valley Press, 2013), winner of the Northeastern Minnesota Book Award for Poetry. Deborah co-edited three anthologies of poetry, most recently Amethyst and Agate (Holy Cow Press, 2015). She was the 2012-14 Poet Laureate of Duluth, Minnesota.
Blue Window is a rich collection of poetry for anyone seeking consolation and expression of the arresting loveliness of "this right light."
Book Details
- Publisher: Clover Valley Press, LLC
- Publish Date: Sep 15th, 2017
- Pages: 164
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 9.00in - 6.00in - 0.35in - 0.50lb
- EAN: 9780997364323
- Categories: • Women Authors• Subjects & Themes - Death, Grief, Loss• American - General
Praise for this book
"As I read the poems collected in Blue Window, I looked up again and again from the page, because one after another they touched me so deeply. The insights, the compassion, the people and stories, the gentle humor--all are truly astonishing. In the poem 'Impermanence, ' Cooper and a companion watch Tibetan monks create a sand mandala that takes them seven days and nights to finish (yes, only to destroy it). She says, 'Now and then our hands meet / or our eyes. / We know that we are caught / in something holy.' In the presence of these luminous poems, that's how I felt: caught in something holy."
--Connie Wanek
Author of Rival Gardens, On Speaking Terms, Hartley Field, and other books
"All I needed to learn again I found in Blue Window by Deborah Cooper. How to pay close attention to the 'swallows and starlings, / maps hidden in their wings.' How to notice when 'a tiny gesture / . . . changes / the direction / of the wind.' How to inhabit the world with eyes and heart wide open to the 'thousand / kindnesses / of green.' Cooper has a stunning capacity to capture the moon's light and apply it as a soothing salve to 'the harsh edges / of stones / lodged in the heart.' Each poem is an essential infusion of longing or grief, wonder or comfort. Her songs enter the cells by way of intimate description. Although she does not shrink from tragedy and loss, her clearest gift is the precise aptitude to hold up to the light 'the particular loveliness / of each small thing.'"
--Gary Boelhower
Author of Naming Rites and Marrow
"The poems in Deborah Cooper's collection Blue Window seek a new language, one that shimmers on the edges of knowing. They attend to the voice of sea no less than to the unspoken languages of bodies, to the vespers whispered in dailyness of being, and to the canticles sung by every element and creature from chestnut hare to amaryllis. Whether inviting the reader to witness birds with 'maps hidden in their wings, ' the 'ten thousand stories sleeping in these stones, ' or 'the bones of the dead' that 'break into blossoms, ' Cooper's delicate lines move across the page with the graceful cadence of music. Each page opens windows to a world filled with an empathetic light, one that 'blues the feathers of the crow.' Read these poems; treasure this light."
--Kimberly Blaeser
Author of Apprenticed to Justice, Wisconsin Poet Laureate 2015-16