Mosefolket
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 (at what price!) to release from art’s obdurate material sixty-nine elegantly wrought meditations on the savage and the sublime. (Norman Lock)
