The Muse Sings

The Muse Sings and the poet sings songs of love and longing from states of joy, self-doubt, vexation, curiosity, affection, observation, mock-indignation…

The poems speak for themselves and sometimes “they talk all at once.” In seductive acts of language itself, they invoke and embrace the Muses as much as they do the writers who would become muses, from ancient Homer and Shakespeare to poets of contemporary time.

These poems are the seasoned work of a trickster poet in his prime with a crow’s eye trained on the world. No silent words on the page, these: they are alert, thoughtful, at turns cheeky and saucy. The poems all but produce decibels despite the inked imprint on the page that would fix them silent in place, until a living voice sets them free.

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

Praise for Dennis Cooley’s writing:

“Cooley unwinds and unweaves, reknits and retangles but is never at a loss of words.”
– Derek Beaulieu, Calgary Poet Laureate

“Cooley stays alive in his music, the singer, the jester, the dancer in broken lines–he rejects the routine, finds the right found words, and sloughs off the dead language, death itself.”
– Maurice Mierau, author of Autobiographical Fictions

“Mind-bending wordplay and genre-defying experimentation.”
– Jon Paul Fiorentino

[Cooley’s] in fine form here, full of the acrobatic playfulness that has become his trademark. (Indeed, [he] sometimes seems like the only author today who actually enjoys writing.)
–The Winnipeg Free Press