Empire in the Shade of a Grass Blade

Poetry. "Eschewing neat closures, Cook creates poems that arguably compose one long gesture, the sections open to and echoing each other, all held together by the pain of a unblinking awareness as well as by a ubiquitous freshness in the writing—if Cook sees a worn linguistic or perceptual path in front of him, he always veers off in a new direction that challenges both himself and his reader. Fueled by a deep dismay, the poetry goes beyond Surrealism, for Breton's 'astonish me' is no longer sufficient; the many contemporary outrages of Cook's 'always lurking, indefinable country' require instead a poetic that can register the shock of 'castrated hymns' and 'the statues of sharks inside our mouths.' Cook's world, where even the ground is capable of falling and wind is torn to plastic, is our own but atomized and reassembled in such a way that what we see through his lens is both strange and familiar. Thus the poet's vision of berries 'ripening / on a noose' encapsulates a life-and-death drama between, as the book's title suggests, the imperial and the natural, a drama that gives an urgent quality to the verse and so invigorates the poet that the end result is a buoyant energy in and of itself a significant victory. Like Whitman in another perilous national period, Cook, by imagining the unimaginable and expressing the ineffable, offers us 'good health'; EMPIRE IN THE SHADE OF A GRASSBLADE is both an antidote for dispiritedness and a guidebook for living in the land of 'commercially-harvested weeping.'"—Philip Dacey