WA-HITA - Poems by Steven R. Cope

Publication Date: May 1, 2017
Paperback, 64 pages
ISBN: 978-1-937968-36-6

Available from Small Press Distribution

Perhaps no poet has ever been more suspicious of the limitations of language than Steven Cope, and more than once in his new collection Wa-hita he writes of his misgivings, stating in “On the Edge” that “I am resolved to look at words // to say best what is there / but

I am resolved that the best thing to do

is to love it all anyway
whether or not I am loved,
and the only way to love is with a heart full of blood

which I feel now pumping at my core.

That pumping heart is at the core of all of the poems here, infusing every line with the vitality that Cope has always drawn from nature and imparted to his readers.

Another theme that runs through all of his work is his uneasy relationship with culture, however deeply he has immersed himself in it, and here that conflict finds its full expression (and perhaps a chance at resolution?) in the title poem, wherein Tchaikovsky and Plath and Mahler and Sexton and Bach and “the wines from the old country” are swept up along with Cope himself into an apotheosis of “the thought of a thought” that touches and forever changes him:

blessed be the thing,
blessed be the real or unreal thing
that came and went without warning,
came and went, say,
and opened all my eyes.

Even so, in the final poem he imagines he is gathering the words dropped into a field by an old poet on “The Back of a Bird” and his old uneasiness returns:

If I gather them now
who can say
if I’ve spread them out on the page

as they were given to me
or if I’ve got them all wrong.
Who knows if this one goes here,
that one over there.

Steven Cope need not worry – every word is just right, and right where it should be. And all of our eyes are opened along with his.

Praise for Wa-hita

Steve Cope is a prophet for our time; we need to hear his integrity of seeing and thinking, and his compassionate respect for our planet and life.

Harry Brown

Throughout this book the poet calls on poetry itself, as the means to grasp even a remote shadow of transcendent reality. This implies the creation of art is an act of faith. I couldn't argue with such a claim. Poem after poem in this book snags the heart, but there is also love abundant in this book, and concluding it I am left inspired and filled with happiness.

Maurice Manning