Listening for Low Tide

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

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"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.

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"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.