{"id":458,"date":"2011-12-05T15:57:57","date_gmt":"2011-12-05T15:57:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ink.verticalplus.co.uk\/archive\/?p=458"},"modified":"2020-12-09T14:38:54","modified_gmt":"2020-12-09T14:38:54","slug":"ken-head-reviews-david-cookes-in-the-distance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/ken-head-reviews-david-cookes-in-the-distance\/","title":{"rendered":"Ken Head reviews David Cooke's 'In the Distance'"},"content":{"rendered":"

In The Distance<\/span><\/span><\/a> <\/span>David Cooke<\/a> Night Publishing ISBN:  978-1-146-096581-8, Paperback 95pp<\/span>

An unusual collection in a number of ways, this is David Cooke\u2019s first publication for many years.  Having won an Eric Gregory Award in 1977, while still an undergraduate, been well represented in poetry magazines of the day and had published his only previous volume, <\/span>Brueghel\u2019s Dancers<\/span> (Free Man\u2019s Press Editions, 1984), he then stopped publishing until the appearance this year of In The Distance, a retrospective sample of his work containing thirty-four poems from that earlier collection, together with thirty-one previously uncollected poems gathered under the title<\/span> Slow Blues.<\/span>  The two groups provide an interesting introduction for readers and look forward to his new collection, <\/span>Work Horses<\/span><\/a>, forthcoming from Ward Wood Publishing during 2012.<\/span>

Itself a title which suggests aspiration towards a yet-to-be-reached, possibly unreachable goal, <\/span>In The Distance <\/span>is prefaced by two specifically religious and spiritual epigraphs, one biblical, from <\/span>Ecclesiastes 1 iv<\/span>, which is concerned with the transience of human life and the belief that, by contrast, the earth abideth forever, the other translated from the work of the Irish poet Nuala N\u00ed Dhomhnaill, in age and background a contemporary of Cooke:  <\/span> Additionally, the collection concludes with five lines on a related theme which are placed, untitled and printed in italics, after the Notes at the very end of the book and not included in the Contents:<\/span>  And we\u2019ve come not one step closer to Mount Zion, \/ or the City of God, his heavenly Jerusalem. Now as snowlight haunts the evening \/ I approach this buried village. \/ My other lives, my name, like footprints \/ that stretch behind me: \/ when more snow falls they\u2019ll cancel.<\/span>  An afterthought?  I don\u2019t think so.  The imagery of these lines is clear and powerful, a key, perhaps, to the poet\u2019s own philosophical position, his view of his project and a path via which individual poems may usefully be explored.  <\/span>

In the opening poem, <\/span>Bruegel<\/span> (one of two alternate spellings used in the book), Cooke meditates on a number of the paintings of Pieter Bruegel The Elder, ending with three telling lines in response to one particular work, <\/span>The Blind Leading The Blind<\/span>:  <\/span>Blind sticks jerk \/ as they stumble on the bank of a stream; \/ while we tread the limits of what words mean<\/span>.  Likewise, at the end of the collection, Coda, the last poem:  It seemed, suddenly, you had reached \/ your final period:  l<\/span>ike Beckett \/ endlessly inventing silences, \/ or Lady Day, her voice \/ reduced to a scorched whisper.<\/span>  Strangely, perhaps, or perhaps not, the references to the Irish playwright, novelist and poet, Samuel Beckett, to his austere minimalism, continual refining of language and voice, his insistence on the importance of listening to the implications of what is said, because language is a universe unto itself, sit comfortably alongside Cooke\u2019s memories of Billie Holiday towards the end of her life, voice burned out by alcohol and drugs, but still the great Lady Day who struggled with and sang the blues like no other.  All suggest a poet working towards acceptance of the limits of his language to express fully what he means.  As he points out in Down, … <\/span>there is no way back \/ to the child or his visionary landscape<\/span>.  What is gone is gone forever and memories, sometimes false, often misleading, at best only an approximation, bring us <\/span>not one step closer to Mount Zion.<\/span>   <\/span>

Not that the poet\u2019s preoccupation with transience and loss renders these poems drear, downbeat or melancholy.  On the contrary, writing with warm humour, directness and well-honed lucidity in a plain style that has the wisdom and humility to be attentive to detail and to avoid the temptation to be slick, qualities in his work that remind me of the poetry of Edward Thomas, Cooke returns throughout to the importance of valuing the everyday in our lives, our memories of those we\u2019ve loved, places that have been important to us, the landscapes of our pasts, of the lives we\u2019ve lived at different points in time and space (in his case, although born in England, his family\u2019s Irish roots).  <\/span>A House In Mayo<\/span> makes the point well:  <\/span>So long abandoned, their house and garden \/ lay caged in the tangle of briars.  As a child \/ I looked for secrets, creating new lives \/ each visit from what they had left behind … Empty houses were scars on the landscape. \/ Wild seeds blew in to heal them.  When people \/ vanished, the tracks they made were smothered. \/ Returning, all I ever found were mine. <\/span> <\/span>

In both <\/span>The Gift<\/span> and <\/span>Connacht<\/span>, two of the poems in <\/span>Slow Blues<\/span>, Cooke concedes that although, as poets, we seek to say what can be expressed in no other way, to bring vision alive through the words we write, create out of our experience a <\/span>landscape perfected \/ in memory, where each tree \/ is rooted, solitary and firm<\/span>, the hard fact remains that vision is one thing, reality another, that in a fallen world, Eden \/ is only a fierce nostalgia for what cannot be regained and that acceptance of life on those terms is our only intelligent option.  Like all good poetry, <\/span> In The Distance<\/span> contains much more than the sum of its parts and, although there is no straight path through the poems, they are, to use a word Cooke himself uses of Peter McManus, to whose memory he dedicates a poem, <\/span>authentic<\/span>.<\/span>



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\u00a92011:  Ken Head <\/a>
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In The Distance David Cooke Night Publishing ISBN:  978-1-146-096581-8, Paperback 95ppAn unusual collection in a number of ways, this is David Cooke\u2019s first publication for many years.  Having won an Eric Gregory Award in 1977, while still an undergraduate, been well represented in poetry magazines of the day and had published his only previous volume, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=458"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23760,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458\/revisions\/23760"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}