This Only Home

Roger Nash is Academic Vice-President of Athabasca University and author
of Night Flying.

In this collection of poems, Cooley seeks to express a sense of the
immensity, order, and beauty of the heavens, and to free the exploration
of space from its domination by jingoism and the sensationalizing quest
for progress. If this domination cannot be broken, then human stupidity
has reached the moon, not the poetic imagination. Cooley enlists many
other voices as helpers, weaving them into the poems. His task is an
important one, in our space age.

There are some strong poems in the collection. “above and below the
moon” creates a wondering sense of the interleaving of order among the
stars with great cycles of the seasons, and ponders the loss of this as
we travel imperiously into space, with no seasons around us.
“visitations” captures a brooding sense of the force of a storm that
leaves behind small and mysterious tokens of its interstellar life.

However, the book is a strangely uneven one. It is as though, concerned
with the vastness of his subject, Cooley has focused on the sweep of his
collection, not on the intricate workings of each and every poem, line
by line. Images often cancel one another or pull a poem into parts. The
sky is likened, in quick succession, to a pasture, an ocean, and
something tearable. Here the sky collapses into a glitter of language
without much sense. As a pasture, the sky is spoken of as tethered to
us. This reversal is mechanical, not imaginative, and fights the sense
developed, in other poems, of the heavens as infinitely more vast and
enduring than us. Mechanical reversals recur throughout the book.

Cooley has only begun to internalize the many voices enlisted as
helpers. In “peeping toms,” he reduces love of the starry heavens to
voyeuristic lust. This undermines Brahe’s and Kepler’s words of
wonder in the poem, which come from contemplation of the night sky as an
end in itself, not merely a means to self-gratification.

Line lengths, lack of punctuation, and creative punctuation (e.g.,
commencing lines with colons) often fight sense rather than shape it.