An interview with Greg Cook

What makes this book of poetry unique?

These new and selected poems reveal what it is like to be Greg Cook growing into his 44 years of writing poetry in a world where the hearth of song is threatened with displacement by the glowing tube of corporate agendas. As Governor General 's Award-winning poet George Elliot Clarke writes, "Cook trains his eyes on genealogy, family relationships, and the strange power of words to rupture and repair both. Cook's voice is gentle, reverent, astonished by love 's fragility and enraptured by its persistence." Re-affirming our humanity and, therefore, our connection to the earth is the unique challenge in Cook 's new poems.

Why is poetry the genre of choice for this book? Why not memoir, or a book of short stories?

The poetry reader 's journey is an emotional one ... dependent upon voice. Voice is the reader 's navigator, her guide through the present consciousness of what it 's like to be alive in the world. (Memory is the vehicle of memoir. Story is the driver of fiction.)

Is poetry this marketable today?

There will always be a market for poetry, because it is the mentor/confessor a reader turns to in lieu of ... or as a compliment to ... one 's own journal, particularly in times of stress. As the current anthology Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times edited by poet Neil Astley for Bloodaxe books in the UK and carried by Mirimax Books in the US indicates, readers are asking for nourishing poems that help us stay alive in a world that feels unreal and inhuman ... a world where preoccupation with language-centred poetry and word-play threatens to relegate poetry to the ephemeral, where the political spin-doctors live. Spin-doctors avoid all the fundamental questions about the human condition. Poetry asks them. Hence the Poets Against the War anthology is currently topping bestseller lists in the UK. Cook 's poetry is rooted in the narrative realist tradition of listening to the oracular wisdom of our elders so intently that we hear with wonder the earth itself speak again. Cook sees into the "vanishing world " where we plunder and risk destroying ourselves.

How much of this book is autobiographical? Or do you blur the lines between fiction and truth in your poetry?

All writing, as Ernest Buckler says, is ultimately "autobiographical, " because to write is to tell what it is like to be, say, Greg Cook. His essence is his poetry ... and all that he knows, which is unique, will be revealed there.

Is this poetry a departure for you, or a continuation of ideas you set a long time ago?

Each poem, of course, is a departure from the previous poem. Cook 's themes of love ... familial and romantic ... are constant, but his world expands to embrace all of humanity in his Songs of the Wounded. His title derives from the lines of Pablo Neruda: "I soothe their wounds and close them. / This is the work of the poet. "
Do you have any mentors? Influences in your life as a writer?
Alden Nowlan. See my biography One Heart, One Way / Alden Nowlan: a writer 's life (Pottersfield, 2003). Ernest Buckler was also a friend whose intimate biography I am considering writing. John Newlove. Pablo Neruda. The naked humanity of these most accessible and confessional writers is their appeal.

Is there something to be "learned" in the process of writing for the writer?

What it is like to be conscious and at home in what seems to be an inhospitable world.