Synopsis
The volume collects the best verse by one of Kentucky's foremost poets, selected by the author from all of his books published over the past decade, including his delightfully witty and subversive children's poetry. Cope is as much a force of nature as the world that he describes with such love. By turns thought-provoking, heartbreaking or humorous, this is work of breathtaking originality and power. "Steven Cope is one of the best poets we have, and I am not talking about just in Kentucky. Not very many people have noticed. I hope they will now, with this presentation of the work he has done over the past decade or so." Mary Ann Taylor-Hall, from the Introduction "There is an almost mineral hardness to the language of many of Steven Cope's poems. I respond instantly to their flintiness, their restraint, their specificity. These are also beautifully thinking, thoughtful poems. Some capture perfectly the motion of a mind at work, the quick jump-cuts, the self-corrections, the startling leaps and associations. Others move more slowly and ruminatively, turning and turning their almost talismanic words fire, crows, green, song, etc. How nice to have at last such a fine and judicious sampling of Cope's work, the recognition that only such an overview can provide of the breadth of his project. We look up from the volume and, like the imagined 'someone' at the end of the poem 'Adam,' we smile, thinking, 'yes I know him, / that s him all right,that's him.'" Davis McCombs "One of the sad bells ringing through Steven Cope's poetry tolls against the foolishness of human violence to the natural world. The failure to recognize our bond to the woods and streams parallels the divisions in our human lives, alone and with each other, a division that in time leads to anguish, and that, eventually, to a state of being that is merely dull and muted. That is where we are. This book, varied, luminous, and true, tells us only the woods, only the green God-given world, will make us whole." Maurice Manning "Steven Cope's poems talk to us from below the place where language lives. They find the voice of wind, of fire, of rain, and bring us straight into the house of our being, where we know that '...the tree, the nest, / the bird, and the egg / are but four ways of being the same thing.'" Jane Gentry
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Selected Poems
Seller: International Book Project, Lexington, KY, U.S.A.
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Paperback. Condition: New. Inscribed by author on front fly. Ships quickly. 100% of the proceeds help send books to schools and libraries in developing countries through the International Book Project. Seller Inventory # SKU1000025