Poetry

This powerful and evocative poem sequence reconstructs memory through pinpoint ancestral connections and personal history. The poetry is as fundamental as the southern prairie landscape in its stark realities, and progressively elemental in its distinctive risks with structure and imagery. It is roots poetry, humorous, anecdotal and wise, but also original, unexpected and profound. Cooley’s writing fiddles with forms, swerves among the vernacular, the comical, the meditative, the linguistic, and the personal. His work exudes a strong commitment to local and contemporary understandings of writing and a continued experimentation with his postmodernist leanings. correction line affirms Cooley’s desire to break from the inexorable narrative and offer poetry its place in the everyday world, while allowing its aesthetic to claim the space and time of the Canadian Prairies for its form, cadence and meanings. As the title suggests there are lines that correct what must change, as there are lines to correct what is already known. It is through this convergence of memory and history that Cooley’s poems shape understanding.

“ . . . Cooley being humble Cooley, you can almost never find most of [his] titles listed on his other books; never one to announce himself, but lets the poems do all the talking.” — rob mclennan, Vallum Magazine