Stones, The

Stones . . . hewn by nature and the hand of man. They shelter us, record our grief, provide hope, joy and provide a window into the past. Dennis Cooley’s latest collection of poetry brings his trademark playfulness and wit to the very foundations of the earth. He stretches his prairie eyes far across the ocean to the cathedrals and monuments of Europe and connects our curling rinks and skipping stones to places rich in history.

AUTHOR

Dennis Cooley

Recipient of the 2015 League of Canadian Poets’ Life Membership Award and the 2013 Manitoba Writers’ Guild Lifetime Achievement Award, Dennis Cooley has been a key figure in Winnipeg’s literary community for over 30 years. He has written extensively on Canadian literature, published 20 books of poetry, and edited numerous others. For years a CanLit professor at the University of Manitoba, Dennis Cooley, now retired, lives and writes in Winnipeg.

Reviews

Dennis Cooley’s poetic meditation on “stones” is an expansive collage of locating the self in the diaspora of mythology, history, geography, and literature. Because this is a long poem of contemplation, Cooley’s locus mundi performs the outstanding range of skill and practice he is able to bring from a life of writing and attention. He is a master of poetry as technique and here shows us how such art can really “make the stone stony.”
–Fred Wah, author of is a door

Look what a long poem can do, when it pursues the grubby and the grand with equal belief, nods to its mixed bag of forebears, and takes no syllable or line for granite, as the pun goes. Best of all, Cooley’s the stones plays hard.
–Gerald Hill, author of 14 Tractors