Common Life

Common Life looks at the various meanings of common, especially its senses of familiar and widely known; belong or relating to the community at large; and its twinned notions of simple and rudimentary and vulgar and profane. The book’s perspective is religious, and is grounded in the epigraph from the Psalms: “Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him.” The “waiting” that is required has to do with three things: first, our desire, as Charles Wright puts it, “to believe in belief” rather than believe; secondly, the need for a setting aside of the self, an abandonment of “every attempt to make something of oneself, even…a righteous person” in the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer; and thirdly, the “waiting” must be as Eliot wrote in the Four Quartets a waiting “without hope for hope would be hope of the wrong thing.” If we learn to wait in these ways, the final section of the book suggests that we have the chance of opening ourselves to all that is graceful within life’s common bounds.

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).

A Prayer to Adam

Muse of names,
Help us to know
What we cannot name.

Gardener of paradise,
Help us grow upright
With the modesty

Of plants that find
Freedom in their lack
Of choices, and thrive.

Father of death,
Help us to live
With our dying

So that we may find
Ourselves walking back
Down a path we forgot,

Towards a field
Here on earth
Where the sun is

So bright and clear
Even the dullest sparrow
Is seen in the richness

Of its browns and grays,
The streaks on its breast
Numbered in our sight.

Yehuda Amichai once divided poets into two categories: those with kishkas (guts) and those without. The latter type, he said, usually devised some justifying theory for their work, though they seldom touch the human heart. There’s no question which group fits Robert Cording, who is as much amused, baffled, and enchanted by the spiritual world as by the physical one he knows so intimately. Among scores of nonpareil poems here, there’s an especially brilliant one called “The Weeper.” And so full of kishkas is Common Life that its author might be dubbed “the weep-inducer.” Here is not only stunning poetry, but also poetry linked to things that matter.
— Sydney Lea

Robert Cording has a profound sense of the fissure that separates self and soul in present-day America. He doesn’t point or gloat; rather, in poem after poem he makes us feel the spirit that is lacking and the spirit that is brimming, that spills over the cup of existence each blessed day. To impart such feeling is poetry’s distinctive province and Robert Cording is a crucial poet, one who shows that our unflinching love can withstand our abiding fear.
— Baron Wormser

April 2006
132 pp
Trade paper – 6 X 9.25
$16
978-0-9723045-7-3