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Songs for the Extinction of Winter

by Rob Cook

Songs For The Extinction Of Winter is a surrealistically silent and craggy trail into the absences of the American landscape, places that few of us acknowledge: a high school that still exists back in 1985, abandoned except for the boy killed in the parking lot and “animals drawn by remedial art students… that bleed brown water/and look like deer”; a homestead where a woman, “cold from the breath of spiders through the deepening house”, worries about her mortality, even after the world has ceased to exist.

The implications of global warming are present but never heavy handed, as images of the dying world drift beneath lines such as “Outside on the late news, the weather buried somewhere in Orion/men disturbed by the prairie’s endless grasses//A thousand skeletons of snow nailed to the river wall.” The book serves as an atlas of access roads and firetrails through the fading cities and antelope wastes. And the inhabitants of this haunting landscape flaunt their deformities as a kind of beauty that exists only in the bleakest of individuals, those who’ve acknowledged their residence in the abyss and have chosen to stay.

Always lurking behind each wounded phrase is the grieving of animals, the “stallions/born from paint/and roan kindling/(who) vault across fires left/by wandering bears.” This book is not comfortable. It will not reassure you about the goodness of humanity, the triumph of the human spirit. It is a pure and honest and highly imaginative mapping of our late-winter species, the era of the homeless indoors. Read this book and you, too, will not be able to ignore “the shrieking of microbes losing their skins.”

—Crow Billings

Rob CookRob Cook lives in NYC's East Village. He is the author of Blackout Country (BlazeVOX Books, 2009) and his work has appeared in Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Many Mountains Moving, Tarpaulin Sky, Fence, Oranges & Sardines, The Bitter Oleander, Mudfish, Parthenon West Review, etc. He has been nominated for enough Pushcarts to know he will never win one.

by Rob Cook

The Neolithic

Because I was only learning

to see, it took months



for you to show me

where your hand curled

into a snail



the electricity scratching

across your nerve sky



contrails that keep you awake



You’ve written their history

and the names



for the laughter between Demerol



and the time it took me

to put your shards together

and see you



because I was too angry

to wear contact lenses



the years I walked around

and didn’t know what a person

looked like



and so I dressed and lived

as a man from the days

before sun



following the storm-lights

through your arm,



past the trees of hot iron



past the stone soldered

on the way to the ends

of your fingers



where I watched you

over and over

in the planet’s thin early air


The Gossip and Incompleteness of American Winter

How many borders built
out of animal silence

Who will remember
the spaces where I was
supposed to talk and didn’t

Can you hear me swallowing
the gin that causes evening,
the sound I make crossing the wilderness
to get away from the words
tangled between party guests—

my face over spider country

an eclipse, a coven of copper snow,

the room’s arctic territories
where Mr. Runyon brags
how he made his bed bleed,

all the speaking between us,
yours:

light that others could use

And you ask me:
Crow, what’s wrong, I can see the January flocks
drifting away in the eyes
of our friends

Crow, when you don’t speak
I hear gypsy moth excrement
even this far beyond summer
falling like a small rain from the trees


It’s all I can do to listen,
but then I realize it’s just more gossip
about the few inches of sunset
before it reaches us

and about people ruined by their clothes,
the starving bison shadows

that will be lived in, by somebody, again.

Mitchell Denning

Wild fires burn in the French Rivera, torrential rains fall in Texas where clouds squat and drown the land, thousands of Lake Tahoe acres are aflame, drought destroys sixty percent of agricultural terrain in Romania, the wheat crop disintegrates in the Ukraine, forty percent of North America’s honey bees vanish, everywhere wildlife in peril. Climatologists predict that by 2050 snow will no longer be able to be counted on in the Northeastern United States. Water promises to be the filthy lucre of the future.

More than a foreboding, there is a consensus among many that our earth has already tumbled from the precipice into climate instability from which chaos is spilling. The planet-scale events are so awe-inspiring that they beggar the imagination. The word ‘surreal’ has been worn out as we grapple for language with which to express our reaction to the protean world we find ourselves in. And because the forces of change are simply too much we are unable to process them and we collapse back into triviality or the mediated or barely literate. From the title of his first collection of poetry Songs for the Extinction of Winter, Rob Cook stands apart in being able to channel the epochal.

When the light turns to stone
Nobody will notice
The dirt will have passed away

The man with the body of a northern
January has to hide far off
In his pockets

The world of this collection is one of lastness. There are no more crows to blacken the woods--/Only a weak voice where the horizon tried to heal, and the bittersweet knowledge that the poet is a witness to the dwindling natural order. Letters I’ve composed to the snow buried inside lobsters. Cook is a visionary, and his net gathers the macro and micro, sometimes in sequence, sometimes simultaneously. The richness of his metaphors is in stark contrast to flat internet-speak, the movement of instantaneous textual information. The same speed and nowness inundates our anti-poetic culture as if only by being in the most immediate of moments will we know we are alive as in the innumerable cell phone conversations about coordinates. “I’m on Second Avenue at the Bank of America ATM.” I crack open your cigarettes/and find a map to the clubs/that stay open through/the long nights of stone. The poet’s sense of place and time contains the hyper present and the primal, clubland and the Stone Age. And what happened/to the ape/who woke on a cavern wall/and still had the stone sky/To carve. Language itself is under assault and in Songs for the Extinction of Winter the syntax is textured, deeply layered and lush. The word world Cook creates is in opposition to contemporary abbreviated idioms.

On a continuum that includes the Elegiac Sonnets of Charlotte Turner Smith O’er what, my angel friend, thou wert,/Dejected Memory loves to mourn, and Janet Hood’s Elegies for Angels, Punks and Raging Queens, Rob Cook creates his poems of mourning for species, eco-systems, alternate universes and friends. Even in these more personal elegies, the poet is melting the hyperkinetic, hypertech age of today with the traditional. He’s growing now/in the darkness Hopkins and Byron/ made for him are the lines that open his “Elegy for a Master in an Age Without Masters,” for the poet Ronald Wardall.

He’s going forward on storm intelligence, maps
he corrected for the pigeons
trying to cross the East River.

He stops to eat an Indian cloud.
He tells lies about his life
so God won’t find him,

that he led the grasses through
the abandoned dial tone of Montana,
that he swept floors while students

poisoned the mop water and janitors wrote
his poems.

Also nested within the larger songs of mourning is an extraordinary elegy for the poet’s cousin. In “Norwegian Deer Trails” Cook takes the solemnity of the form and breaks it before reshaping it into something still sorrowful but brilliantly whimsical and idiosyncratic. I look out the window at the deer leading daylight/back into the woods—/Followed all winter by their own/tracks, they must know where the wind sleeps/and which tree the snow is coming from. Those are haunting and satisfying lines but the poet doesn’t stop there.

Today on the phone to Norway,
my cousin’s voice ruined
by AIDS and the freezing long-distance,

I kept slicing carrots and zucchini
and mixing Dr. Sorge’s Blood Rejuvenation
Powder and Rose Hip Formula with apple juice

forcing the sludge down into my body
starved into the shapes of hypothermia
from three years
of nardil and low blood sugars,

the background tape of the homeopathic maverick
repeating:

Even single-celled organisms
turn to wood after eating pizza.

Cook has a genius with titles that are almost one line poems in themselves. “Temp Work in Seven Atmospheres,” “Birthday of the Thirty-Five Gemini’s,” “The Gossip and Incompleteness of American Winter,” are three examples. The collection is divided into four sections, with Part One and Part Four containing the thirteen Songs for the Extinction of Winter. These are sequences that repeat and enlarge the themes of lastness and lostness, how the epochal and personal entwine. The images and voice of Rob Cook have been compared to that of Cesar Vallejo. It has been noted that the “difficulty of his poetry [Vallejo’s] initially hindered the international recognition it deserves.” Like Vallejo, Cook’s poetry might be considered difficult and the same sort of descriptive language applied to Vallejo’s work–“impressionistic, chaotic, even incomprehensible”—might be applied to Songs for the Extinction of Winter. Vallejo and Cook share the visionary eye, the quick surprise, vulnerability and often a quizzical playful tone that a child might delight in.

The moon made of cobwebs taken by wind/will hurt us, and soon. Yet there are differences, timing being one. Cook confronts not the Spanish Civil War but the deflowering of 21st century capitalism that had overreached to the point it can no longer be sustained, a time of ultra-careerism and self-promotion, a rankness where poetry exists to illuminate the poet. Vallejo labored in obscurity struggling mightily to elevate the poem not the “I.”

Cook takes up that struggle and makes poetic subject of the flattening of the individual into a consumer. For market shares, the feral world is being forced back everywhere. People in elevators complain, ”I hate it. Winter just isn’t me.” This is the poet for the age without masters. His songs are against platitudes, against slum megapolises, against crop depletion, against love depletion. In the saying and seeing of that which hasn’t been seen or told before there is extraordinary imagery and breathtaking beauty. There is a pause in the weather that makes you tremble/Because of its teeth that sound like the flawed whispering of deer.


Gail Gray
Owner Shadow Archer Press Editor of Fissure Magazine

It’s hard to take an art derived from a series of odd synapses in brains, crossing cultures, dissolving boundaries, touching something not previously touched, feeling the wind arise from a revenant’s hidden corner. The wind hypnotizes…and you are lost, surrounded. And as this wind moves this one in that direction, it moves another differently. Prods different steps, seeks other hideouts.

And then once in a while, comes this one guy, he’s walking kind of slow, taking it all in. Sure he feels the wind…but just a little ahead of time so he stills himself to not be afraid. He allows it to wash over and through him until it becomes part of him.

And once it’s part of him it leaks out from the splits in his seams and the holes in his pockets and the gaps between his teeth…and he must sing it or dance it or make poetry of it. And when he does, people are moved more than they are by the seduction of the muse or the insistence of the angel…as Lorca knew so well… are moved by duende.

And that guy, the one who knows how to meet the wind, the one you need to read, the one who understands. ..the man who wields surrealism like a wand to summon memories in surprise tastes, measures from poignant to bittersweet….sometimes just plain bitter, that man whose words makes your blood rush dark and furtive… that guy is Rob Cook. Just read his poem “Birthday of the Thirty-Five Geminis.”

And so the circle…the Ourorboros eats its tail.

I didn’t make the connection until a few months later, after being seduced by Cook’s lines in poems such as “Elegy for a Master in an Age Without Masters,” “Hypoglycemia,” or the series of poems named in the book’s title and find the melancholy hidden between the spaces.

Frederico Lorca married duende to surrealism, inspired by painting (Dali), who was inspired by psychoanalysis (Freud) who was inspired by his patients’ dreams. I was unnerved and shook up by the surrealists, finally “getting it” after all these years. I’d been launching my own search thanks to “The Aristos” by John Fowles and Heraclitus, Jung and Vanilla Sky and Stay, and I discovered there were many paths to the same experience….the Gnostics, Illuminati, Alchemists, Buddhists, Shamans., hallucinogenic aficionados. Each had found their own way to the center. But the Surrealists?

Not in a million years did I see them there, even though the connection was deep in my solar plexus, complex, perplexing.

Appolinaire put a name on it, Andre Breton’s spelled it out in the “Surrealist Manifesto” not quite poetic, but emphatic. And of course, it’s all there…surreal…not just a fancy title to explain melting clocks and broken swans, but just what it says…beyond the real. Beyond the mundane reality to individualistic personal to the unio manifesto.

Rob Cooke, as a surrealist poet, proves it’s not a skill like harnessing, but a release, like inviting the wind in. And when the wind and the poet become one, the duende, the deep song from the center comes alive and breathes its momentary but long lasting touch upon your soul. It’s an intuitive lyrical dance...the duende. It comes and you put yourself in its way. Rob Cook has mastered the dance. Find his poems online, find his book, wrestle an angel for it, sucker punch a muse to read it.