Hidden River Poems

Sparling Mills was a freelance reviewer living in Herring Cove, N.S.

Hidden River Poems is a short book — only 19 poems. Most of them concern nature exclusively; however, I shall concentrate my remarks on the ones that include humans because they are by far the best.

The cover photo of a river introduces one of the book’s main themes: “inner currents.” This theme is presented most clearly in “At Flat Brook.” As the poet and a companion approach, “four blue herons / lift from the brook, into thick fog ...” The “rare beauty” of the scene sets their bodies free; they shout with “sudden joy.” They perceive “The inner currents have been fed.”

Yet Cooper warns us that while we are experiencing these subjective sensations, we may fail to realize there is “A god [who] stands / at our shoulder, filled / with the essence of a sage.” In “The Gods,” Cooper explains further: only when we are able to hear “the voices of fish and rocks” will the gods “return / to hearths / and stone fences.” Lyrically he exclaims

and we will feel them,

moving through stone ...

In another dimension, it seems that the poet’s grandfather is a god to him. In “At Cleveland Brook,” Cooper tells us that “Years ago, my grandfather / walked these same stones, / fished this same brook.” He wonders if the “brook stones / still contain / the sound of my grandfather’s step.” And do the “still pools / give back the reflection of his face?” In the next poem, “The Pearl Inside the Body,” Cooper’s grandfather again predominates. Cooper is five years old, and his grandfather seems to be the only adult in his life. Scenes are remembered — his grandfather “carrying a string of trout,” stalking the “huge” wild cat, standing in the hall “in his long underwear,” dying in winter.

One of the most powerful pieces in Hidden River Poems is not a poem at all, but two small prose paragraphs called “The Starflower.” For those of us who are not sure if we want to be buried or cremated, it is a strong argument for burial. In the “First week of May,” Cooper finds a starflower — “dry now, white ... yet still holding its form ... like the design our own bones will make after death, cleansed of the flesh, slowly sinking into the earth ...”