Accounting for the Dark

"Peter Cooley makes poems of faith, grounded in intelligent doubt. If his long view is eternity, his poetry marks a daily meditation that does not neglect the songs of neighborhood birds or the murder of George Floyd. His value is inestimable. Cued by Dickinson, Whitman, and Donne, for more than fifty years, he has remained one of a very few living poets who write for the ages." * Rodney Jones *
"'Follow the dark,'" enjoins one poem in Peter Cooley's aching new collection. 'Yes, I can do this,' declares another: 'All it takes is absolute surrender.' Reading these poems, I savored not only how they come out of a long apprenticeship of reading and to poetic craft, but also how they come out of a long life of experience, love, and grief-out of a vale of soul-making. I believe Accounting for the Dark is Cooley's most memorable and powerful work to date." * Jennifer Grotz *
"Grieving the death of his wife and the loss of a close friend to suicide, isolated in the midst of a global pandemic, this poet still finds the miraculous in life's dailiness. 'My soul has taken in the clear, cold light / paradise offers when we have lost enough,' he explains. Like a medieval mystic or iconographer plunked down in contemporary New Orleans, Cooley melds the language of angels, incarnation, and resurrection with smartphones, city garbage trucks, and granola bars on sale at Shoppers' Value. The result is a luminous collection that will leave even jaded readers reawakened to the beauty of perishing things and the mysteries of the unseen." * Julie Kane, Louisiana Poet Laureate 2011-2013 *