Against Consolation

Connecticut Book Award Finalist 2004

Arlin G. Meyer Prize 2005

The title poem takes its name from a passage by Simone Weil, “We must not weep so that we may not be comforted.” But in this and other poems, Robert Cording offers a more hopeful vision of our ability to find consolation in the world we inhabit—a world endowed will offer endless spiritual possibilities, both in nature and within ourselves.

Fashion Shoot, Frijoles Canyon

Where did they come from? – suddenly, among the Anasazi
ruins: two models, a photographer, two hair stylists,
a smiling entourage. Racks of dresses and skirts,
of blouses and vests and accessories. Across the canyon,
in the emptied rooms of a pueblo, I had been pretending
to piece together dusty traces of the past. I couldn’t
imagine the effort required to cut dwellings out of cliffs.
I watched them through binoculars: flutter of hands,
sweep of skirts, a loose blouse luffing in hot breezes –
and the faces, changing expressions as the photographer
moved right then left, as he kneeled and lay down,
the rest following, as if wherever the models were going,
desire would be satisfied. He waved his arm
and the wind covered or revealed a face, the sun imparted
its fashionable radiance and shadings, and soon enough
I imagined the pages of the magazine taking shape,
its glossy attractions like a vague desire enlarging itself,
each new item turning into a necessity, its cost
and possession always larger and more elusive,
and always promising a greater satisfaction, the glory
of a different future alive in those clothes, in those two
models who went on posing long into the afternoon
in a world where the Anasazi scratched deer and running
men into the million-year-old canyon walls and then
vanished, leaving us to ask all these years, where did they go?

So much to praise in this lovely book: the grave, sweet, considering tone of the poems, that makes so much room for seeing things so clearly and for thinking about people’s lives, his own and those of others, so generously and without forcing conclusions on them. The skill with which Cording works, the subtle plainness and directness of his writing, opens the poems unconstrictedly to a wide range of emotions, sometimes elegiac, sometimes full of pain, sometimes registering experiences of unexpected joy, ”the plenitude of the unintended.”
— David Ferry

What I admire about Robert Cording’s latest collection is the way the poet keeps transforming his naturalist’s scrutiny of the world into moral interrogation, bringing to our attention, in poem after poem, “the strangeness we were born to.” Whether examining the dusty disintegration of moths, the death of a spoke grace, are indeed “against consolation.” . . . Exact in their language, balanced in their formal properties, these poems can finally celebrate “the plentitude of / the unintended,” and call us to a deeper, more complicated, more inclusive understanding of what “simply living” means.
— Eamon Grennan

February 2002
88 pp
Trade paper – 6 X 9.50
$14
978-0-9678856-9-8