Gabriel's Wing [Paperback]

Allan Cooper opens his collection, Gabriel’s Wing-yet another beautifully made book from Gaspereau Press-with a single poem that sets a rural and nostalgic tone. “The Driftwood Man” is an exemplar of concise simplicity. Eastern influences are apparent from the start:

The potatoes grow
in neat rows
beside the brook.
The earth
breathes evenly.
That was years ago.

Cooper’s has moments of brilliance, but only when he sticks to Spartan simplicity; any attempt to philosophise sends the poem tumbling into meaninglessness or cliché.
A first book often feels rushed. The poet wants to get his or her work out there, and so sacrifices sober reflection for momentum and energy. This appears to be the case with Alan Cooper; while austere with his lines, he might have thought longer about the quality of his words.
For example, Cooper commits the mortal poetic sin of writing about cats. This is not to limit the subject matter for poetry; however, whenever cats are concerned it seems the poetry becomes irrelevantly domestic. This frightening trend seems to have left the parlours of little old ladies’ poetry circles and has planted itself, like a big fat tabby, in the poetry of older, established Canadian poets. (The cutest cat moment I’ve seen comes in Robyn Sarah’s poem “Bounty”: “No, look - here comes the cat,/with one ear inside out./Make much of something small.”) Meanwhile, Cooper doesn’t content himself with one mention of cats in the incredibly ineffectual “The Best Days” (“It’s when the cats are content”). “Small boy and leaves” also has a cat that “jumps out of the leaves/and onto the boy’s shoulder”, and in “Faces” we “can’t understand why/the cats left.” Perhaps it was the poetry.
This feline fetish is a shame, because elsewhere, as in “The Shed of love”, Cooper’s poems are simple, word-steady, and taut. Here’s the second stanza:

There are faces in senior’s homes
folded with light. One smile
and they smile back at you,
bearing lanterns
dissolving the ballast
of anger and grief,
from this world
to the next.

In “Honeybees”, a longer sequence of couplets that link through enjambment (they’re not quite ghazals but do have that detached ghazal-like quality), Cooper’s simplicity allows the broader impression of the poem to settle in on the reader. This quality is especially poignant at the end of “The Night Heron”:

I need to ask you this question:
when you say “love,”

why do you weep? Now,
you mean everything to me.

Cooper has purchased the pop-song cliché quality of the last line with the innocence and intensity (“I need to ask you”) of the previous ones. Despite the “I”, it is the absence of an overbearing, editorialising voice that gives this speaker credibility. In “The Night Walker’s Poem”, however, it’s as though he’s trying too hard to attain Zen, with vague pronouncements that fail to be profound: “I don’t think I was meant to come here/it just happened.” Isn’t effortlessness the point of Zen? And, while I’m asking rhetorical questions: Why is it that poets think that by being vague (“some messenger…they’re determined to be somewhere else…someone’s expecting us”) they can gesture to a vast body of untapped meaning?
If I may mention another pet peeve: as meaning is not implicit in cats, nor in grandiose notions of vagueness, it’s not likely to be found in simple, one dimensional adjectives like “small”. For example, in the first of “Two love poems”, instead of saying “this is the small farm of love,” it would help to show us how small. The second of these is small enough, though, that the poem speaks for itself:

Love is the unformed haze
rising through the poppies
and the eyes, weeping, see it.

In “Small boy and leaves” we have the same problem: small seems to be the default setting-surely the poet has a greater vocabulary than he is letting on.
Sometimes good poets write bad books. This is clearly the case with Allan Cooper’s Gabriel’s Wing, as amidst all the vague, small, cat poems, there are some gems-“Honeybees”, “Hope” and the final poem of the first section, “Green Ears of Wheat”:

There are openings to the other world through the
green ears
of wheat. Haven’t we always expected this?

Especially when the rain falls in slanted bars across the open sky, the opened heart.

For hearts, like wheat
are meant for bending.

How much can we take?
“Bring on the wind,” whispers the wheat.

Again, it is the isolated simplicity that seals the deal. We are made to feel like we’ve heard this wisdom before, but, thankfully, we are not told where. The transposition of heart and wheat is natural, and as a reader, my heart sang along to the wheat’s challenge. When the poet has us whispering along with the wheat, that’s the “something” we’ve been looking for.
John Lofranco (Books in Canada)

“Cooper’s poetry in this collection is not flashy nor is it busy with distracting constructions and irrelevant forms. The meditative and sometimes elegiac poems are served by clear, concise language that calmly trods the paths between this world and other worlds that impinge on ours in what Cooper calls ‘the thin places’.” John Tyndall, Quills Canadian Poetry Magazine

“In writing that successfully walks the tightrope of delicate beauty without faltering into precious, Cooper evokes a world that also needs balance and care.” Sue MacLeod, Atlantic Books Today

Gabriel's Wing is a poignant meditation on the sensation and manifestations of love and loss in the context of an other or afterworld. Sounds in one world resemble those in the other, hearts broken in this one reopen in the next. Allan Cooper goes beyond metaphoric comparisons, working to pinpoint the exact sensation and tactility of grief, moving emotion into the physical realm.

The poems are bound together with repeated images. Gardens, cells, light, wings and wind feature prominently and provide a landscape in which to ponder the nature of grieving. Running beneath this landscape is a logic that sets out to prove that while the price of love is indeed loss, the hope in loss is that it has been preceded by great love. As Sandra Barry wrote in a review of Cooper's work, "in an age when the ideas of beauty, love, generosity and reverence are considered old-fashioned, regarded as sentimental, Cooper enacts each with a gentle will."

Cooper has a knack for smudging the boundary between interior and exterior, without forsaking specificity and vividness in doing so. This collection is rich with movement and illumination as the shapes of past existences maintain their tangibility in the world that lives on.

This 5 x 8 3/4 inch book is a Smyth-sewn paperback with cover flaps. The cover is printed on Neenah Classic Crest/Classic Columns duplex stock, and features a reproduction of an intaglio print by New Brunswick artist Dan Steeves. The text was typeset in F.W. Goudy's Deepdene by Andrew Steeves and printed on Rolland Zephyr Laid paper.

Allan Cooper has published eleven books of poetry, including, most recently, Gabriel’s Wing (GP, 2004) and Singing the Flowers Open (GP, 2001). He has twice won the Alfred G. Bailey Award for poetry and received the Peter Gzowski Award in 1994. Cooper is also a musician. He was a member of the trio Isaac, Blewett and Cooper for a number of years and later went on to release a solo project, Songs for a Broken World (2002). He lives in Alma, New Brunswick.