National Network for Equitable Library Service

This collection brings together Allan Cooper's best poems over the last forty years. He weaves visions of nature with insight into the workings of the human heart. Read them individually or read them as a single long, flowing and eloquent narrative. The meditative and compassionate observations will transport the reader from the chaos of everyday life into a healing realm of possibility. In Toward the Country of Light, the author offers open sonnets, prose poems, ghazals, small poems inspired by the Chinese and Japanese, and poems influenced by Robert Bly and Francis Ponge. As Cooper observes, "Over the years I've come to understand that the poem itself usually demands the form it takes and that language uses us for its own secret purposes."