Mars Poetica by Wyn Cooper
White Pine Press, 2018
Wyn Cooper’s newest book, Mars Poetica, has been making my job teaching poetry a lot easier. “My idea of heaven is a road / that winds and winds toward home,” Wyn writes in the poem “My Idea,” and he finishes the poem with “My idea of a night on the town / is staying home in the country. // My idea of a basket is your lap. / My idea was to steal your ideas // until I became you.” Look how much I have to glean here with my students: the triangle poem that starts with a wide idea and finishes up close and specific, the use of repetition to hold and deepen the readers’ attention, the use of line stops and how it enhances the pacing of the poem. This collection is a marvel of craft and one I will reach for not only to teach my students, but to deepen my own writing.
The opening and title poem, “Mars Poetica,” is an invitation for an immediate shift in perspective with the rolling assonance that Cooper does so well: “Tell your story slantwise, / streetwise, in the disguise / of an astronaut in his suit.” In this poem and others, Cooper considers the tension between perception and experience, the inner and outer states of being. Another poem, “Pulse,” is precise and beautiful, a look at inner and outer states, a marveling at intimacy:
I put my hand on your wrist
not just to feel your skin
but to feel the blood that races
from heart to fingertip
and back, another lap
of the city of you.Pulse of the city, pulse
of your state, pulse
of the nation containedin your veins, vines
that grow grapes whose
wine we press tonight:
licorice, mineral, spirit.
Cooper uses all the tools of the poet here: diction, sound, image, rhythm, meter, cadence. When I ask my students if a poem’s strength is linguistic, emotional, or intellectual, they are stumped when considering Cooper’s work as he consistently hits each note so skillfully.
My favorite poem in this collection is “How Silent the Trees,” a poem of seven couplets, reminiscent of his prior collection, Chaos is the New Calm, a compilation of modern sonnets. This poem of direct address considers grief, and the crisp language and pacing of the poem reflect the crispness of grief itself: “How to wind a watch / so tight time stops. // How silent the trees, how / loud the shots of hunters.” Cooper ends the poem there, leaving us in the ricochet. Cooper’s poetry lingers in the ear and the mind of the reader. Cooper ends the title poem with “Tell us something we didn’t know / before: how words mean things / we didn’t know we knew.” This, I tell my students, is the work of poetry.
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Michele Bombardier is the author of What We Do (Aldrich Press, 2018), and her work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Poetry International Online, and many others. She earned her M.F.A. in poetry at Pacific University, works as a speech-language pathologist, and is the founder of Fishplate Poetry, offering workshops and retreats while raising money for humanitarian relief.