Robert Cording – författare

The title poem takes its name from a passage by Simone Weil, "We must not weep so that we may not be comforted." But in this and other poems, Robert Cording offers a more hopeful vision of our ability to find consolation in the world we inhabit-a world endowed will offer endless spiritual possibilities, both in nature and within ourselves.

Forty years as a poet has kept Robert Cording looking at the details of everyday experience. That long labor has brought him face-to-face with the inescapable complexity of a world that is full of suffering and injustice. And grace. This journey has convinced him that, as Czeslaw Milosz puts it, "poetry embodies the double life of our common human circumstance as beings in between the dust that we are and the divinity to which we would aspire." Cording''s task has therefore been to evoke what he calls "the primordial intuitions of Christianity": that we live in a world we did not create; that God''s immanent presence is capable of breaking in on us at every moment; that most of the time we cannot "taste and see" that presence because we live in a world of mirrors; that only by attention can we live in the world but outside of our existing conceptions of it. The reflections in Finding the World''s Fullness--comprising not only thoughts on metaphor but also close readings of poets ancient and modern, including George Herbert, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Bishop, and Stanley Kunitz--suggest that, as Richard Wilbur puts it, "The world''s fullness is not made but found."

These poems--selected from the past three decades--are firmly rooted in what Richard Wilbur called the "e;hunks and colors of the world."e; They faithfully try to take into account a world we did not make and, at the same time, record the terrifying and painful contradictions of human experience. And finally, they try to do so while remaining open to the intrinsic joy of being. These are poems rooted in the belief that words can invoke those presences which bring us back, again and again, to the fundamental experience of being: that there is something rather than nothing. The poems in A Word In My Mouth embody, as Czeslaw Milosz puts it, "e;the double life of our common human circumstance as beings in between the dust that we are and the divinity to which we would aspire."e;

In his poem, "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," William Blake hypothesized that "If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite." Of course, Blake's "doors of perception" are both hard to clean and even harder to keep clean. For John Ruskin, the famous 19th century art and social critic, seeing demanded a scientist's respect for fact, but also a love for what was being seen. These poems ask us to attend, with devotion and care, to a world which will always remain a mystery, but a mystery in which love calls us to the things of this world where we may become most fully human.

In Only So Far, Cording's poetry vacillates between complaint and praise, lamenting and loving our "sowre-sweet dayes" as George Herbert's poem "Bittersweet" puts it. Behind the book lies the story of the Promised Land that Moses never quite reaches, and those "little daily miracles" that Virginia Woolf says stand in as a kind of recompense for the "great revelation" that never does come. Poets and poetry readers will embrace Cording's eighth book of poems. His work is of interest to librarians and ministers in seminary programs.

In poems that range from New England to the Southwest, Without My Asking, takes its cue from Psalms 90's petition-"teach us to number our days." That biblical sense of limits-of what we can know and not know-and, ultimately, the mystery of before and after that encloses our existence is the center around which these poems turn, both seasonally and from day-to-day. In poems that attend to the events of our lives-from the deaths of parents to hummingbirds at a bird feeder-these poems work to utter "Yes" to all that happens, that "peculiar affirmative" that recognizes, as Elizabeth Bishop says, "Life's like that . . . also death."