Dennis Cooley is one of Canada’s most decorated and important poets. In his last collection, Wind and Horses, he ventures into the permissive and erotic, more ludic, comical. Partly political in writing the poverty and distress of the times, much of the poetry evolved into more emotional short stories so powerful you can hardly read them aloud. What runs through the poems is a sense of longing. They have been fired, but never held in the broken voices, the blocked and bewildered not-saying, a deep sympathy for the exhausted and threadbare figurers who weather the drought. In the poets own words: “It is their music—something deep and yearning in them—I have tried to write.”
“Dennis Cooley has been instrumental in shaping the landscape of Canadian poetry. He has given us a way to imagine ourselves across time, place, and language.”
– Barbara Schott
September 30th, 2020
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.”
