Walking with Ruskin

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.

Robert Cording taught for 38 years at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts, and is now a poetry mentor in MFA program at Seattle Pacific University. He has received two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in poetry and his poems have appeared in publications such as the Nation, Georgia Review, Southern Review, Poetry, Hudson Review, Kenyon Review, New Ohio Review, New England Review, Orion, and the New Yorker. He has released five books with CavanKerry Press: Against Consolation (2002), Common Life (2006), Walking With Ruskin (2010), Only So Far (2015), and Without My Asking (2019).

Staying Awake

I’ve spent one third of my life asleep,
I read, and so I considered
how the drag and suck of Everyday
conspires against my waking—
jobs, meetings, grocery shopping,
house repairs and mortgages.

After I’d added on the dread of everything
I should have done but didn’t, or did,
and had things turn out the very way
I’d feared, I just wanted to lie back
and dream, but I made myself sit up
in my chair, which brought to mind

my grandmother who liked to tell me
at family dinners, if I didn’t sit up
straight, I’d become a hunch-back
as an old man, and now I was one,
at least in part, my shoulders slumping
forward, too heavy to hold up.

By then I was living in the past,
those dinners when all my grandparents
were alive, and my great-grandparents
on my mother’s side and all my aunts
and uncles. I was saying their names—
Anna, Henry, Eleanor, Emma, George—

when, of course, I fell asleep and dreamed
that someone was whispering,
Wake up! Wake up! in a room
that the afternoon sun had warmed,
but now was running out of light.
And still I did not wake up.

The tradition from which Robert Cording’s poems emanate is the rich borderland between spirit and religion, between nature and God, between suffering and redemption, between Wordsworth and Eliot. The wonder of Cording’s work is how off-hand it seems—art-as-modesty and modesty-as-art. The humility at work here is genuine yet the dark questions about our time on earth remain. The answers are the poems themselves—equivocal yet powerful, resonant yet casual, calm yet fraught. To look human failing in the eyes and not blink is an achievement, to join praise in the same breath is very special.
— Baron Wormser

One takes an immitigable journey reading Walking With Ruskin by Robert Cording: the distance not far—a room, a neighborhood, a pond a mile off, a wood—but the sphere, the scope, is staggering. This is Dickinson meets Hardy meets Frost meets Yeats: vast emotional range; a deeply loving, empathetic gaze; stubborn exactitude and rigorous thought; and scattered everywhere about, the great contraries: life and death, light and darkness, song and silence, presence and absence, terror and ecstasy. While these traits of some of Cording’s precursors are visible, the liquid ease with which the tier of material flows concordant with the tier of manner is his own doing. Like slipknots being pulled taut, richly varied sentences always break concisely across the line: the reader never falls, and, when each poem concludes, he or she is left in a clearing with more, not less, to think about. To achieve, consistently, such resonant last chords, is true mastery—and generosity. Cording’s years chasing fleet-footed Eloquence have paid off: again and again, he catches her.
— Gray Jacobik

October 2010
116 pp
Trade paper – 6 X 9.25
$16
978-1-933880-21-1