Reaching into the classical world but including more recent references, as to a line from Donald Justice, Cooper Renner gives us sixty-nine short lyric or elegiac poems that are muscular, adroit and handled with the unsentimental assurance of a knife set to its ends by a keen intelligence and profane desire. These are not poems for those who imagine they will console themselves in a vanished Arcadia or escape the violence of the present. These are -- in the words of Mr. Esteban's "Medusa's Lover" -- "lullabies / my mother sang to me; / [as I] watched the fish gaping as though mad / to take my hands / to the bone." Those of us who wished once to be poets -- and failed -- and are no longer even young will be glad that one was able to release from art's obdurate material sixty-nine elegantly wrought meditations on the savage and the sublime.
Reaching into the classical world but including more recent references, as to a line from Donald Justice, Cooper Renner gives us sixty-nine short lyric or elegiac poems that are muscular, adroit and handled with the unsentimental assurance of a knife set to its ends by a keen intelligence and profane desire. These are not poems for those who imagine they will console themselves in a vanished Arcadia or escape the violence of the present. These are -- in the words of Mr. Esteban's "Medusa's Lover" -- "lullabies / my mother sang to me; / [as I] watched the fish gaping as though mad / to take my hands / to the bone." Those of us who wished once to be poets -- and failed -- and are no longer even young will be glad that one was able to release from art's obdurate material sixty-nine elegantly wrought meditations on the savage and the sublime.