Only So Far

In Only So Far, Cording’s poetry vacillates between complaint and praise, lamenting and loving our “sowre-sweet dayes” as George Herbert’s poem “Bittersweet” puts it. Behind the book lies the story of the Promised Land that Moses never quite reaches, and those “little daily miracles” that Virginia Woolf says stand in as a kind of recompense for the “great revelation” that never does come.

Poets and poetry readers will embrace Cording’s eighth book of poems. His work is of interest to librarians and ministers in seminary programs.

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).

Only So Far is a perfectly wonderful book. I say “perfectly” not as a gush word but because, true to its etymology fromperfectus, “thoroughly made, accomplished, fully realized,” the book is one thoroughly, fully realized poem after another, his voice and its language seeking out the importance of even such a slight thing as breaking open a leaf of mint and experiencing its clean sweet smell […] Over and over, in this book, such gifts are offered. The quiet voice in these poems, calmly studying its own experience, cannot avoid the knowledge of its own mastery and its capacity to offer such pleasures. Hence the beautiful serene authority of its writing, its versification, its syntactical elegance.
— David Ferry

Robert Cording’s poems are so stripped-down, so lacking in affectation they almost fly beneath the radar. Almost. Except for the fact that every few stanzas, every few lines, something strobes forth to make us catch our breath: an arrow of wit, a shot of pure sorrow, the ripple of an apparently effortless interior rhyme. Cording weds eye to heart and intellect to mystery with a power that devastates, arouses, and not infrequently delivers startling consolation.
— Leah Hager Cohen

October 2015
116 pp
Trade paper – 6 X 9.25
$16
ISBN 978-1-933880-49-5