THE FURRBAWL POEMS: UNCOLLECTED POEMS, 1973-1993 - by Steven R. Cope

Publication Date: June 2005
Clothbound, 184 pages
ISBN: 0-9721144-4-0
$27.50

Also available in paperback

I have a gnome in tattered breeches
I feed with the hound.
He limps out of the forest

And up to the pan.
He laps up the gravy.
He thinks I don't see him.

—from "Furrbawl"

Steven Cope has indeed seen Furrbawl, his primordial alter-ego; and in the verse gathered here—the "uncollected" poems from his first decades of writing that did not find their way into one of his previous thematic volumes—he shares many such visions, mysterious, exotic, even disturbing, lurking in the ordinary, conducting us on a journey across twenty years rich in poetic imagination and observation, through wonder and humor and despair and hope, and through his own evolution as a poet.

Praise for Steven R. Cope and The Furrbawl Poems

I'm delighted, and relieved, to see Steve Cope's work getting the long-overdue attention it deserves. He's among our deepest, most eloquent and versatile writers, 'a man come to his senses, a dignity enraged.'" —James Baker Hall

Steven R. Cope is a poet in the tradition of Homer, Whitman, and Yeats. Committed above all to write even at the expense of creature comfort and in contempt of convention in art and life, he owns a cosmic vision including animate and inanimate, human and nonhuman, soul and body, God and evil. Within The Furrbawl Poems is a rich and entertaining world of humor, wit, wisdom, and the myriad mysteries within existence.
—Harry Brown

These are poems by which we may devise our own latitudes and longitudes as we make the journey. They glow like foxfire, they plead with the terrible urgency of prayer.
—Charles Semones

Congratulations to Steven R. Cope, whose latest collection, The Furrbawl Poems, reveals the courage of a poet who says what he wants to say and in his own way. Cope writes of childhood and of politics, of the familiar and of the strange, and somehow all of these previously uncollected poems together say more than he knows, "more than can be known."
—Betty Peterson