Description
Cooley conducts a chorus of "clucks & barks & muffled cries" to unconstrained cacophony. Bursting with a remarkable and encompassing cast of spiders and fish, crows and bears, rats, chickens, and cows, The Bestiary gives free rein to very human feelings and the way they grow, stunt, and stampede out on the prairie landscape. Amid hushed and howling moments, the natural bends uncanny while the extraordinary roots into the organic under Cooley's careful eye.
About the author
Dennis Cooley grew up in Estevan, Saskatchewan, and attended the University of Saskatchewan and the University of Rochester. He is an active member of the writing community in Winnipeg and teaches at St. John’s College, University of Manitoba. His latest book of poetry is the bentleys (2006).
Nicole Markotić is a poet and critic who teaches at the University of Windsor and edits the chapbook publication Wrinkle Press. She has published two poetry books, Connect the Dots and Minotaurs & Other Alphabets, as well as a fictional biography of Alexander Graham Bell, Yellow Pages. She is currently completing a novel.
Awards
- Short-listed, High Plains Book Award for Poetry
Excerpt: Bestiary, The (by (author) Dennis Cooley)
the creatures
you've got to remember
your Ps and Qs
all the glitches in our plans
the years of itches & clichés
the geese queuing
the ditches chowdered with tadpoles
you would have sworn
frogs were emeralds and they shone
saskatoons sharpened on sun
turned to tart & gooseberries
screwed up on their spindly legs
berries swollen so large and pale a person
could almost see through
there also was the cow called Esmeralda
whose hormones blew past
a ruddy and sometimes luminous moon
and sandhill cranes would wade
the hills in quadrille and the prairie
chickens ran thickly in front
of the chilled morning
they square-danced and dosey-doed
high-stepped in front of the old truck
almost stopped the stupid things
dead in their tracks and coyotes
coaxed the moon from their throats
a time when
potatoes rolled out of the ground
big as cabbages round
as groundhogs the rain
fell hard or softly
found the just and the un
just in the Souris
Valley and on the fields
of France pulled january
across the cold
foxes trotted over
the sheets we pulled
over our breath
quick to give and find
where they left their tracks
and do you dream the secret hay
the smell of flowers
when you let yourself back
into the soft dust
its tea and yielding
spring summer winter fall
the moon cracked open
leaked marrow over
our upturned faces
Editorial Reviews
There are other tongues apart from our mother tongues that influence how we understand language, the sounds breathed by the lungs of beasts in the field and sung from the mouths of beasts on the wing. Dennis Cooley speaks in those tongues, animal and human, rendering them with poems about eight-eyed charlatans and black-beaked hucksters. The Bestiary is a Naturalis Mysteria, an encyclopedia of mysteries discovered in an uncanny land by Pliny of these prairies. It is a meta-Metamorphoses, a translation of myths uncovered in an unreliable library by our postmodern Ovid.
-- Nathan Dueck, A Very Special Episode
The world shines with life, with mystery, animated by animals, and in The Bestiary Cooley gives voice to it all. Compressing coal-black crows to diamond, Cooley crafts jewelled lines.
--Jonathan Ball, The National Gallery
Filled with owlish wisdom, this bestiary hovers, swoops, and tilt-wings, as the crow flies, over the contours of a prairie and its species unique to Dennis Cooley, his tender observations, his wild surmise.
--Aritha van Herk