Slovenly Love

Douglas Barbour is a professor of English at the University of Alberta.
He is the author of Lyric/anti-lyric : Essays on Contemporary Poetry,
Breath Takes, and Fragmenting Body Etc.

Slovenly Love, Cook’s third book of poetry, is full of love
(especially for her infant daughter). However, it is anything but
slovenly. Its five poetic sequences reveal a writer who is at the height
of her powers and who knows just how to use them in a variety of
contexts. Her poems explore desire, love, journeying, and returns
(bpNichol is one of many literary ghosts hovering over these poems), as
well as the dangers and joys of writing.

The volume begins with “A Year of Birds,” a delightfully
entertaining piece (full of wordplay) about a child’s first year. The
poem’s playful turn on nursery rhymes is heard in the swift internal
rhyming, the cut and thrust of line breaks, and the joyful noise of
sounds rhythmically attuned. “Blue Lines” takes us on a journey from
coast to prairie, through real mountains and those of rhetoric.
Throughout Slovenly Love, the different relationships the poems explore
also stand for that between writer (or writing) and reader (or reading).
Here the blue of sky and water soon becomes the blues; these poems sing.

“Trawling: A Biography of the River” commemorates “the brief but
not uneventful hyphen between the birth of Heraclitus in 535 B.C. and
the great Winnipeg flood of 1997.” As might be expected, this prose
poem plays philosophy off against the ordinary lives of Winnipeggers
trying to deal with that flood while never stepping into it twice.
It’s full of wit and subtle comedy. As, in their different ways, are
“Kiss by the Hфtel de Ville, 1950, and Other Kisses Various” and
“Tempestuous,” the first of which takes up the question of what is
lost and what gained in the graphing of both writing and photography,
while the second interrogates the power of Prospero’s “Art” when
placed against the bodily desires of Miranda, Ferdinand, and,
especially, Caliban, for whom the learning of language, of names, took
him away from his intimate knowledge of what had been his island.

Throughout Slovenly Love, Cook demonstrates her love of language, song,
and the intimate art of poetry. This book is a gorgeous addition to the
canon.