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Postscript    by Geoffrey Cook Amazon.com order for
Postscript
by Geoffrey Cook
Order:  USA  Can
Véhicule Press, 2004 (2004)
Paperback
* *   Reviewed by Hilary Williamson

This slim volume of poetry is Geoffrey Cook's first collection. It's in three parts - 'Peninsula' set in Nova Scotia; 'Sonnets and Other Songs from Czechoslovakia' that address both the country's antiquity and modernity; and finally his powerful Maritime 'Shorelines'.

I immediately liked 'Moving In' on a foggy day ... 'a home's not real unless it's half imagined. We make each move not knowing if what's coming through the fog is threat or gift.' In the title poem set in Czechoslovakia, Cook speaks of 'How on winter evenings the cobbled streets / hunch beneath the ice and iron's wrought / the way our toes retreat / into our soles.'

The third set of poems opens with 'In Memoriam Donald Whitman Cook' (who died in Europe in 1944) and a poignant reference to 'your only son, who's set adrift / on an ebbing tide, the shoreline lost in fog, and no man at the oars of his small skiff?' And I loved the imagery of 'a whale shouldering the swell / and shrugging off the sea-road' in 'The Seals at Green Rock'.

Geoffrey Cook addresses both an intense connection to nature and loss in this remarkable collection of verse that takes the reader from the Maritimes to Czechoslovakia and back again.

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