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- BOWL - ELIZABETH COOK OCTOBER 2006
ISBN 1-905208-09-X
A5 80 PAGES
£10 / 15 EUROS
( See Authors)
ELIZABETH COOK was born in Gibraltar in 1952, spent her childhood in Nigeria and Dorset, and now lives in East London. She is the editor of the Oxford Authors John Keats and author of Achilles (Methuen and Picador USA), a work of fiction acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic. Her poetry, short fiction and critical reviews have appeared in many journals including Agenda, The London Review of Books, Poetry London, Stand and Tears in the Fence. She was a Hawthornden fellow in 2003 and has recently written the libretto for Francis Grier’s The Passion of Jesus of Nazareth, jointly commissioned by VocalEssence in Minneapolis and the BBC. Elizabeth Cook’s first collection expresses a dynamic passivity in which openness to the weight and texture of experience is met by containment. A central sequence traces the pressure which a grievous passage of family history continues to exert on later generations.
These poems speak with the immediacy and fierce honesty of recorded thoughts. Exploring the world for the small gestures, the real details that act as revelation, she is both a celebrant and a custodian of memory. Her vision is eloquent and profoundly humane.
Martha Kapos
These are poems that combine boldness and honesty of thought with remarkable delicacy of expression, facing the fullness of experience with a stubborn, patient accuracy that never forgets that the world comes in touching, precise detail. Elizabeth Cook has a very distinctive style, almost a prose-writer’s thoroughness, but forced into poetry, so to speak, by its intensity and brevity. I am put in mind of Marianne Moore, but Cook is tougher than Moore…
D.M. Black
