Green Notebook, Winter Road - Softcover

Cooper, Jane

4.22

9 ratings by Goodreads

9780884481423: Green Notebook, Winter Road

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0884481425 ISBN 13: 9780884481423

Publisher: Tilbury House Pub, 1994

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Poems deal with nature, family, childhood, aging, dreams, and expression

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From Publishers Weekly:

The "green notebook" of Cooper's (Scaffolding) latest collection is an imaginary, imaginative wellspring: "It seems I am on the edge /of discovering the green notebook containing all the poems of my life,/ I mean the ones I never wrote." In Cooper's work, poetry seems to represent this openness of mind, which attunes the poet to future events as well as to new possibilities of expression. Poetry, however, also maintains the same sense of wonder and possibility regarding what has already happened. The past expressed in a new way releases new insights, and so becomes an event in the present: the past can be, literally, revived. As Cooper writes in "Ordinary Detail," "I'm trying to write a poem that will alert me to my real life,/ a poem written in the natural speech of the breakfast table." The first section of the book is entitled "On the Edge of the Moment"; the sensation of reading Cooper's work as a whole is that of thinking out loud, seeking the temporal and spatial edge where reality is made and unmade. She is not a poet of memorable lines so much as memorable feelings-a writer who adopts a generous, unpossessive attitude toward language, memory and life.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist:

In Cooper's fourth book of poems, her work takes on a more melancholy tone than before. Through all the poems, there runs a definite and fast-rushing undercurrent of sadness. She begins "Hotel de Dream" by proposing "Suppose we could telephone the dead. / Muriel, I'd say, can you hear me? / Jim, can you talk again?" The desire here to summon the dead and give them the gift of her stunning images continues. A less talented poet might have made the subjects of death and loss too morose to contemplate in a sustained series of poems, but Cooper infuses a countervailing sense of quiet hope. Her art here consists in finding peace within sadness, warmth within seriousness. Elizabeth Gunderson

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