Books by Robert Cording

In poems that range from New England to the Southwest, Without My Asking, takes its cue from Psalms 90's petition--"teach us to number our days." That biblical sense of limits--of what we can know and not know--and, ultimately, the mystery of before and after that encloses our existence is the center around which these poems turn, both seasonally and from day-to-day. In poems that attend to the events of our lives--from the deaths of parents to hummingbirds at a bird feeder--these poems work to utter "Yes" to all that happens, that "peculiar affirmative" that recognizes, as Elizabeth Bishop says, "Life's like that . . . also death."

These poems--selected from the past three decades--are firmly rooted in what Richard Wilbur called the "hunks and colors of the world." They faithfully try to take into account a world we did not make and, at the same time, record the terrifying and painful contradictions of human experience. And finally, they try to do so while remaining open to the intrinsic joy of being. These are poems rooted in the belief that words can invoke those presences which bring us back, again and again, to the fundamental experience of being: that there is something rather than nothing. The poems in A Word In My Mouth embody, as Czeslaw Milosz puts it, "the double life of our common human circumstance as beings in between the dust that we are and the divinity to which we would aspire."

About the Contributor(s):Robert Cording teaches English and creative writing at College of the Holy Cross where he is the Barrett Professor of Creative Writing. He has published six collections of poems: Life-List, which won the Ohio State University Press/Journal award (1987); What Binds Us to This World (1991); Heavy Grace (1996); Against Consolation (2002); Common Life (2006); and his newest, Walking With Ruskin (2010).

The title poem takes its name from a passage by Simone Weil, "We must not weep so that we may not be comforted." But in this and other poems, Robert Cording offers a more hopeful vision of our ability to find consolation in the world we inhabit--a world endowed will offer endless spiritual possibilities, both in nature and within ourselves.

Walking with Ruskin looks at the difficulty of perception, of just how hard it is to simply "see" without asserting our own self-importance, self-needs, and self-justifications