Accounting for the Dark: (Carnegie Mellon University Press Poetry Series)

A poet wrestles with faith and loss post-pandemic. In these poems, Peter Cooley encounters both the political realities of loss through the pandemic in New Orleans and personal loss through the deaths of family members and friends. Death is a constant in this book of elegies, but the redemptive power of representation is persistent as this poet of faith memorializes imagined and lived experiences.

About the Author :
Peter Cooley is emeritus professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Tulane University and former Poet Laureate of Louisiana. His books include The One Certain Thing, also published by Carnegie Mellon. He is poetry editor of Christianity and Literature.

Review :
"Peter Cooley makes poems of faith, grounded in intelligent doubt. If his long view is eternity, his poetry marks a daily meditation that does not neglect the songs of neighborhood birds or the murder of George Floyd. His value is inestimable. Cued by Dickinson, Whitman, and Donne, for more than fifty years, he has remained one of a very few living poets who write for the ages." “'Follow the dark,'” enjoins one poem in Peter Cooley's aching new collection. 'Yes, I can do this,' declares another: 'All it takes is absolute surrender.' Reading these poems, I savored not only how they come out of a long apprenticeship of reading and to poetic craft, but also how they come out of a long life of experience, love, and grief—out of a vale of soul-making. I believe Accounting for the Dark is Cooley's most memorable and powerful work to date." "Grieving the death of his wife and the loss of a close friend to suicide, isolated in the midst of a global pandemic, this poet still finds the miraculous in life’s dailiness. 'My soul has taken in the clear, cold light / paradise offers when we have lost enough,' he explains. Like a medieval mystic or iconographer plunked down in contemporary New Orleans, Cooley melds the language of angels, incarnation, and resurrection with smartphones, city garbage trucks, and granola bars on sale at Shoppers’ Value. The result is a luminous collection that will leave even jaded readers reawakened to the beauty of perishing things and the mysteries of the unseen."