The poet tells us that ‘I do tend to go for work that is rooted in real experience and focuses upon particulars’, avoiding abstractions (he writes of Stéphane Mallarmé’s ‘desolate quest for an absolute/in the glacial lake of verse’, for example, a pursuit that is not human enough for him), far from Lenin too, for example, and his ‘language of a big idea’ (see his poem on Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya) avoiding ‘the din of certainties’ (in ‘Fathers’). In the epigraph to his poem ‘Magnesium’ Cooke quotes David Hume approvingly that ‘The difficulty, then, is how far we are ourselves the objects of our senses’, the poet situating himself ineluctably in the world of the sensorium (Neil Fulwood has written perceptively of Cooke’s ‘poetic ability to study the everyday’), a stance that lies at the root of his poetics, celebrating quotidian flux (‘the simplest routines that can save us’), one of the reasons I think he likes the poetry of Phillipe Jaccottet (see his translation from Jaccottet on p.169 of the book) and Boris Pasternak (see his poem ‘The Pasternak Season’ which wonderfully evinces the beauty of a snowfall). This approach has meant that Cooke has managed to maintain ‘a consistency of tone and outlook across the years’ (his words from the same interview) which means he has forged a voice very much his own. This outlook, and I think it is a sane one, is reinforced in a translation from the work of Constantine Cavafy where he writes that ‘he has not courted the world’.
So if I have any claim to authenticity, it probably stems from this’. In an interview with Patricia McCarthy first published in Agenda, reprinted here, the poet told her that ‘I have never been what you might call “fashionable”. This excellent compilation comprises nine collections of poetry David Cooke has published over the past forty years or so. Signed copies available here (via the ‘Editor’s Spot’) for as long as stocks last. It is reposted here to avoid the inconvenience of having to scroll down through a substantial document.Ĭollected Poems by David Cooke. The Following review of David Cooke’s Collected Poems was published recently in the online supplement of Agenda.
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