A New Book

Fall is coming along here now. The first few branches of the maples are turning red and yellow. The bees are busy among the white and purple asters and the hummingbirds are gone until spring. The days are shorter and at night sounds carry great distances--a good time to read Jimenez and Lorca again.

My next collection, I Didn't Come Here to Meet You, is starting to take shape. I've been writing this book for three years and wasn't even aware of the connections between the new poems. Two quotes made me aware of hidden shadow the manuscript was beginning to cast: "Absence makes what? Presence, presence" (John Thompson); and "All the waters of the world find one another again" (Hermann Hesse). It will be a varied book, style-wise: lined poems and prose poems, small poems and a long elegy called "Requiem." I figure another 12 months of revision and the manuscript will be almost there.

Finally, a small fall poem. The last of the blueberries are picked, but when I was in the field above the house last week, I remembered this little piece from twenty years ago:

BLUEBERRIES

After picking blueberries alone all afternoon
I carry
some consciousness of the fields back with me.

(Copyright 2007, Allan Cooper)