Marlboro Review—“The Way Back” (review of book by Wyn Cooper)
- Winter/Spring 2001
Marlboro Review—“The Way Back” (review of book by Wyn Cooper)—Winter/Spring 2001
The Way Back
Wyn Cooper
White Pine Press, 2000
$14.00
ISBN 1-893996-03-4
reviewed by Ethan Gilsdorf
1150 words
A sharp, sly and restrained tone infiltrates Wyn Cooper’s The Way Back, and if you’re not careful, the plain diction and relative brevity of the poems could be confused with shallowness. That’s an interesting issue, to be sure: how can a poetry whose very tools are the basic building blocks of day-to-day speech—what Williams cheered for so loudly—still convince the reader to consider them carefully? In Cooper’s case, it’s tone and point of view that lifts his subjects and their speech habits from the quotidian into some zone resembling insight.
Hapless men are featured prominently, but not unsympathetically. Frequently inhabiting bars, and junkyards, grinding coffee and listening to loud neighbors, his characters seduce us with their matter-of-fact rants and mundane takes on a beaten-down existence. A combination of dramatic monologue and character study, what you might overhear at your bowling alley’s Ratskellar Lounge, his poems offer scant romantic hope and eschew nostalgia. Cooper’s characters seem emotionally stunted, somehow defeated, yet willing to accept their lot in life. A poem like “The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms” reads like a lunch counter confession from a wayward loner with no one to talk to, except whoever happens to slide in beside him:
What I do most days is this: go down
to the store for a six-pack and smokes.
Come home, consume, get out my guns.
What happens after that is out of my hands.
People explaining their lives, defending how they’d arrived where they did. In “Junkyard,” an amusing loner’s story of the UFO that set him on his unique path, the guy advises: “We change as quickly / as our words, so I use the same ones / to tell myself again what happened.” Each poem swirls in the microcosm of its character’s own dangers, neurosis and failures.
Cooper’s touch is to drop the reader into the drama of the poem midway, as if the action and circumstances for the speaker’s dilemma had been going on for days, if not years. The situation and narrative absent, we find ourselves one step removed from total comprehension. Cooper won’t construct elaborate scenes or paint detailed landscapes. We see a corner of it, from the back of the house, lights dim, poor sightlines. We’re listening to the circus of interpersonal relations through the wall of an adjacent motel room; we’re looking through the murky brown bottle of a warm beer. First person alternates with third, while others are addressed to that amorphous ‘you,’ a crutch in contemporary poetry, to be sure. But Cooper manages to suggest that ‘you’ is not identical to ‘I,’ that it represents a longing conversation with someone else, a person the speaker desperately wants to connect with or settle a score. In the sestina “Talk,” the poem begins:
You’re going to ask me why I am
here, and I’m going to tell you.
But I want you to look at the scar
on my arm, this one right here in the shape
of a mouth, though not a human one.
I like to talk about my scars, I like to talk
about all kinds of things, but there’s no one to talk
to most of the time.
The speakers use plenty of monosyllables, though surprisingly you’ll find a four- or five-beat iambic salmon running upstream, faint but discernable, through most of Cooper’s lines. Poems like “Vicious” employ strict rhymed quatrains. Other received forms can be found in “Kids,” “The Life of the Mind,” and “The Way Back.” Elsewhere, a nursery rhyme rhythm, with shades of Dickinson’s or Creeley’s hymn meter creeping in from time to time (not to mention James Tate’s signature irony), and patterns of similar sounds, ratchet up the tension between seemingly offhand subjects (parenthood, party chit-chat, jilted love) and the fairly common diction in which they’re couched.
The rules are set in ink as blue
as the blood which made them,
the ache of thought and word,
believed or not, relieved of that
found most foul, eye-wide owl
hooting loud the question “Who?”
— “Dish”
In fact, many of his poems tread that fine line between stand-up comedy (or stand-up tragedy) and poetry—a finely wrought joke studded with one-liners and comic pacing. Consider ‘Fiernze,’ which I’ll quote here in its entirety, as it represents Cooper’s preferred line and poem length and is fairly emblematic of his stanzaic preference:
The women have all gone
to Italy. The men
have been left behind.
The women have gone to see
what the men would have
kept from them, which the men
can no longer have, now
that the women have gone
to a country shaped like a boot.
The men kick themselves with the boot
in their heads, where it hurts the most.
At dawn they look into the sun,
toward the ocean across which
the women have flown.
The women are in Firenze. They burn
in the midday sun, and they will
burn tonight. The men continue
to say “Florence,” and wonder
why they were left behind.
Uncommon these days, Cooper likes to play with words, delighting in knocking sounds against each other in forms of his own making, counting syllables or repeating certain key words like “sway,” “talk,” “way,” “spite.” Wordplay and enjambment to confound the reader’s expectations energizes lines like “now I lay / me, now I peep in the window,” “you had (to) … show me who / was boss hog and who was just a pig” (both from “Brief History”), and “When you wish upon a star / (who you think you are you are)” (“Bright Bird of Weather”).
His final section “The Way Back” is less successful than the strong, witty and sympathetic poems of the earlier three sections. More meditative, and ultimately more inconsequential, the poems that close the volume seem spoken by a less confident, more floundering voice. The subject matter attempts a headier grasp at the nature of perception and expression that sometimes falls flat:
Funny how one thought
Leads nowhere, another
Goes straight to the point
Of light in the ceiling,
Feeling filtered down
In swirls of warm tones
— “Where Are the Thoughts”
Cooper is the obscure poet who hit the jackpot after being “discovered” by a pop singer who turned his poem “Fun” into a smash hit. That poem, in its original form, is reprinted in The Way Back, though it first appeared in his 1987 volume The Country of Here Below. His new collection merits your listening, even if you’re the kind of person who usually changes tables to avoid the types who populate The Way Back, those speakers from the dull bars, trailer parks and dilapidated farms of America’s backside. Even if you prefer air travel to the train that
pushes aside what stands
in its way, unless it stands
for something else, metaphor
backward, something big stands for
something small, unimportant
as weeds beside the rail bed.
— “Train”
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