Posting the Watch, Poems by Michele F. Cooper
Ranging
from terse lyrics to expansive prose poems, the pastiche of techniques in
Michele F. Cooper's Posting the Watch come together to depict their
memorable protagonist, Sadie Larkin, persisting in farm life with defiant
determination.
Sample Poems by Michele F. Cooper
"'Who is she to chance the wild?' Michele Cooper's character Sadie Larkin, in this remarkably unified and purposeful book of poems, seems essentially a solitary country woman. But the action here is not monologue but dialogue--an implicit conversation between Sadie and the world, and another maybe even more urgent dialogue between Sadie and the imaginative poet who 'chances the wild' by creating Sadie and tracing her actions."--Robert Pinsky, Poet Laureate of the United States 1997-2000
"Your writing is really flying! I feel that the muse has grabbed you--she or he or both has impelled you to invent a marvelous rollicking new form. I love the combination of prose and prose/poetry."--Ruth Whitman, author of Tamsen Donner: A Woman's Journey, The Passion of Lizzie Borden, Poems New & Selected, and Becoming a Poet
"The Sadie poems are an especially remarkable sequence, not unlike the Huffy Henry character in John Berryman's Dream Songs. The Sadie character, I venture, will take her place with the great memorable American personae of our modern and contemporary literature. There is truly an American voice here which Whitman called for. The language is inviting and seductive; the forms are lyrical and experimental. It is socially and politically perceptive, at once meditative and thought-provoking. I am particularly impressed by the speech, which is natural and affecting. Her speakers, including Sadie, are neither parodies nor cartoons; they are flesh, blood, and perceptively intuitive, with 'everything in place/everything right and tidy.'"--Herbert Woodward Martin, author of Inscribing My Name: Selected Poems; editor of Escape to the Promised Land: Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar (Penguin)
"These poems are Michele Cooper's homage to a woman's hardscrabble life. Clearly, Cooper has an utterly profound love for her heroine and for the land--and clearly, in this gutsy, hand-wrought, roll-up-your-sleeves collection, they love her right back. Viva Sadie! Viva Michele Cooper!"--Janet Kaplan, author of the prize-winning The Glazier's Country and The Groundnote
"Michele Cooper's Posting the Watch is a stirring series of poems, long and short, that create a character, a setting, and a larger-than-life, balladic story. Sadie Larkin, with her streaming hair and dragging skirts, is left by fate and will to care for a run-down farm alone. The desire to escape one's lot, the drive to see it through are so life-drawn that the reader of another time and place makes the passage with Sadie and is the better for it, is exhilarated."--Sondra Zeidenstein, founding editor, Chicory Blue Press; author of Resistance, A Detail in That Story, and Late Afternoon Woman
ISBN 978-1933456850, 100 pages, $17.00