Listening for Low Tide, my chapbook containing twenty-five poems, is now available through Amazon at the following link. The cover picture was taken from this blog and can be found in the entry for December 20, 2015.
The blurbs are a bit hard to read on the picture that I downloaded from Amazon, so I am adding them here.
"James Cooper’s Listening for Low Tide is a collection
of poems that keeps us listening for the sound of a limb breaking from a
beloved tree, for train whistles cutting through the night, engines revving,
and neighbors next door. These poems take us from overseas “where I guarded
three nuclear bombs” to Northern Ireland where the poet writes a postcard to a
friend back in Kansas, to an airport in Pratt, Kansas where he watches penned
cattle surely bound for slaughter. The
images in these poems are clear, fresh, and photographic, sometimes tinged with
loss, other times with love. I am
reminded of two other poignant Midwest voices, William Stafford and Ted Kooser,
who pay attention to the things most of us miss and bring them to us as gifts
of language. In Cooper’s poem, “Memorial
Day,” we encounter hundreds of moths, “millers to us,” with a kind of
delightful specificity that has us batting at them like the cat, “ghosts
haunting the air above the house.” These poems will haunt you in a good way,
like the millers, letting loose the ghosts of people, places, and events
stuffed away in the trunk of memory."
--Anita Skeen
Series Editor, Wheelbarrow Books
Founding Director, Michigan State University Center for
Poetry
_____________________
"The poems in this volume listen as much as they speak. The
voices of frogs, geese and katydids coexist with the sounds of jackhammers,
chainsaws and trucks bound for slaughterhouses. As such, there is a gentle,
pastoral quality that overlays the subtle urgencies of potential violence and
destruction. These core tensions are ever present and well-wrought in Cooper’s
thoughtful poems."
--Mark Cox, author of Sorrow Bread, Poems 1984-2015.
_____________________
"In Listening for Low Tide, the further, more distant
tide without which nothing continues, James Cooper moves the reader through a
deceptively quiet, sometimes lonely world. At times, the poems offer an
understated spookiness where a man alone puts into words things so large that
only offering the small things of a life may offer clarity. Cooper’s poems also
are lovingly threaded with an interior music."
--Pamela (Jody) Stewart, author of This Momentary World:
Selected Poems.
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