Wonder About The
By Matthew Cooperman
Middle Creek Publishing | 2023 | 85 pages
the information flows / that is yearning.
– Robert Duncan
Thoughts on things
fold unfold
above the river beds
– Lorine Niedecker
River: a livestream? Witness blue herons, human settlement, meanders, “a spilling presence.” Winner of the 2022 Halcyon Poetry Prize, Wonder About The builds a “field sense,” that is, a poetic ecology that reveries past and presentness of a place we learn is dotted with buttercups, underlain by oil shale. If a river in this work feeds hunger, lust for extraction, “Civilization’s rolling dreams,” it also sustains the pleasures of rambling and wildlife encounters. River as wonder cabinet of “distributed harm” and “scattered sheens.” As a river braids through landscapes—human-altered, pinned with derricks, ranched, home to plant and wild animals—these poems curve through personal and documentary terrain.
The collection contains stunning photographs, including a view along Prospect Ditch in Weld County, Colorado—one of many irrigation channels fed by the Cache La Poudre River in Cooperman’s home region:
Who are these ditches
named for, no not the person
who dug ‘em, nameless
dead from a foreign land, the
immigrants Mules ate better
I was curious about Prospect Ditch and looked it up. A City of Fort Collins brochure notes the problem of trash dumped along ditchbanks and in ditches. Like a vine rising out of a furrow, ecopoetry reminds us there are tendrils and consequences to our human pattern of living on Earth. Wonder About The presents a catalogue of patterns—agriculture, extraction, diversion—and contemplation: “he went to the wells to see what he could find.”
“Thesis,” the opening poem, recalls in long rolling lines Whitman’s continental longing and love of place. Embodied field notes: “It breaks at its wrists, gathers at its waists, fattens the meadows.” And name bodies (a term of Cooperman’s I loved): “Hinono-eino, Arapahoe, and / Mogwachi-núuchi, Ute.” Seemingly unending vistas and unrepentant Manifest Destiny fed and, yes, still gorge in this work that speaks to the number of oil and gas wells in the poet’s local terrain. Throughout its three sections, this collection’s strategies are various, lyric, and often fragmentary: collage sequences, reportage, erasures, quoted material, rearrangements, homage. Such a poetic mosaic holds multitudes: “lazy trout,” “bad governors,” “money and the nameless body of earth.”
Is this how Cooperman’s love of place becomes a song? Leave nothing out: threat of wildfire, meth in the community, family tensions: “we made this.” Surely a truism: what we hold and mourn enters the body of our art. I don’t know his territory, but it is easy to identify with an abiding (embodied) love for Earth, biophilia. Wonder About The pushed me to again recognize the local name bodies where I live—Pojoaque Pueblo, Nambé Pueblo, lenticular clouds over the Sangre de Cristo mountains—for their deep residence in my imagination and words.
Meadow: pastureland inviting settlement; in Robert Duncan’s words, “a made place.” “Wanted,” an erasure of “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow” harnesses Duncan’s inner terrain, compresses and updates its energy for the 21st century:
a field
source
of roses
against chaos
Let meadowy—a grassy, wanderable expanse with a stream sometimes running through it—describe Wonder About The. In this collection’s textured song, even the element Carbon is given a voice: “I like heat it’s the way time moves / stupid animals like freed clots / from my own warm heart.” Quotidian observations, lament, life’s renewingness—all are collaged in “Another River in Spring.” On the macroscale, an aerial map of braided terrain; on the microscale, rivulets of line and image. That Earth’s imagination is vast is perhaps the undertruth of these poems.
As a river braids wide seeing with the personal, a “prism view” (the poet’s phrase) gathers itself. Call it wonder. The collection’s title quotes avant-garde environmental poet and composer Theordore Enslin (1925-2011). Wonder, a first response? Or given human yearning’s reach, a last? Perhaps, wonder is the action of release, a recurring word here, a restorative relation to what is. If wonder can open us, can it also be said it wanders?—as in a dream, another repeated word. Dreams of profit: “before plumes out / blood or a national monument”; dreams of return: “Let’s get to a / clearing, a star meadow dream.” As in a braid, syntax can move sideways:
bee balm salves and teasel traces
the local marks the locale
the hero marks the house
where god’s gone curiously
gone into oil capital
which is a river
The eye of these poems is compound, marking both grouse and gravel pit to intimately map local order and variance. “[T]he living eye” takes note from within its field:
centripetal recognition sees
honing and hum
we are from
a great ball
we’re standing within
Wonder About The melds encounters in the outer world with the experience of embodiment. Specificity knows a nameless dread is defeating. From “Second Report on the Niobrara Shales,” “24 drills 18 tanks / the mind a method / of extraction Michelle.” If a poem journeys through a nervous system, “Skin of River Dressed” places the reader on the river in an innertube: “go, turn, spin, drift, forget / which way is home or up.” In an altered paradise, a river can still solace body and soul as it forgets and remembers.
Lineage: we forget our ancestors, we remember them. One of the embodied pleasures of poetry is its historical and aesthetic commons, its memory. This work reminds me that a group of poems can feel like a dinner party with loved relations. Besides Duncan, Lorine Niedecker, and W.B. Yeats, Wonder About The quotes from Paterson, William Carlos Williams’s now classic poem of place. “Real World,” the collection’s final poem, is another erasure—this time, from a page in James Galvin’s novel The Meadow (Owl Books, 1993), a hundred-year history of a northern Colorado meadow.
I found myself immersed in Wonder About The more deeply each time I entered it. From “The Rolling Problem,”
o desolatos lost
to the western night o
pitch
our soul’s arroyos
the little tracks
and trails
I look up from a page across a field to the snow-covered Truchas peaks. Nearby, acequias will run with snowmelt in the spring. Connection to Earth seeds and transmits. (See Matthew Cooperman’s Imago for the fallen world [from Jaded Ibis Press, 2013, with collage artist Marius Lehene]—in some ways, a long list poem—for another compelling ecopoetic journey.)
Meditation: “a rhythm to imagine / a legacy of flows.” Wonder About The records the rhythm of encounters with human yearning—thirst, survival, greed—as well as the reach of perception encountering what is—identified here as “wakefulness.” Cooperman’s dedication, “For all the creatures, past, present, and future who live along Minni Luzaban, the Cache la Poudre River,” foretells an encompassing connection to the intricate interwoven threads of a locale. Call it a documentary and lyric survey of place. Call it homage. Perhaps the poet’s “who walks through the door of a river” is not so much a question as it is an invitation to experience the highly local as an opening to the cosmos. This collection asks, “what is the progress of a river.” Read What About The for these answers: “a self-recurrent / riffle of chi,” “a litany,” “the boundary of the field.”
Mary Cisper’s chapbook, The Particles, was published in 2023 (Thixotropic Press). Her collection, Dark Tussock Moth, inspired by 17th-century German naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian, won the 2016 Trio Award (2017, Trio House Press). Her poems and reviews have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Interim, Colorado Review, South Dakota Review, Annulet, Terrain.org, and elsewhere. She lives in northern New Mexico.
Read poetry by Mary Cisper appearing in Terrain.org: two poems and two poems.
Header photo by Ivan Larin, courtesy Pexels.
