The Unraveling
AUTHOR
Wyn Cooper
Sometimes whimsical, sometimes bereft, but always honest, these poems are compressed, language-centered testaments to the difficulties of life in our time, not just here in the U.S. but wherever “the weathervane spins in uneasy wind.” These poems traverse the world, from Boston to Mississippi, from Scotland to France to Tuscany and beyond, to “distant places no planes fly to.”
There’s an urgency to these poems, not only in how they depict both inner and outer worlds, but in how they’re constructed—not a word is wasted, and the most urgent of these lyrics appear to rush across and down the page, their lines enjambed, their interior rhymes almost riddles, as if by rhyming they might find answers in repetition.
Many of the poems are centered on human relationships both distant and close, on romantic love and how it can unexpectedly unravel, “the smell of your perfume still in the air.”
In the end, the real center of these poems is emotional truth, as it applies to individuals and to the population at large, and how that truth can make or break us. There’s darkness here—how could there not be on a planet dissolving before our eyes—but there’s also hope that humans can come together again to piece together the broken world.
Reviews
"In this brilliant, wrenching book, Wyn Cooper shows himself again a master of an off-center lyric: what seems familiar in his method, as in the world, shifts suddenly, grows uncanny. It’s personal, but it’s not. The prevailing theme is a persistent melancholia whose source is obvious and yet mysterious: “Something silent floats among us,” one poem tells us, which might be
“spleen, and grace, and grief— / what thoughts point toward.” Cooper is uniquely attuned to our inexplicable discontents. “It is not convenient to work on feelings scientifically,” Freud wrote. The inconvenience vexes us. That’s why we have poetry."
— T.R. Hummer
"Wyn Cooper’s The Unraveling opens with “I Trust the Wind and Don’t Know Why,” which says pretty much all we need to know about the mystery of faith––or faith in mystery. These are poems of engagement and attachment, of wisdom and bafflement. With arresting restraint, Cooper interrogates intimacy and distance––how hard it is to know the self, and others. These poems are a masterful and haunting catalogue of how we navigate––churning forward and looking back––with the memory of perfumes, with “false compasses,” with the “velour clutch filled with grievances” we might never let go of."
— Andrea Cohen
"The Unraveling is an apocalyptic travelogue of haunting snapshots and metaphysical espionage, with each sly dossier full of “umlauts and the imperative mood, / idioms and assonance and bitter pills.” Like Donald Justice, Cooper is a wizard at mapping loss and psychic exile—investigating the glimmering topography of “fingerprints on windows / that look out on rain,” or tracking fictional ships on wine-dark seas—no matter how much these twilight séances cost him."
— Simeon Berry
“Are you crossing the bridge, or lighting it on fire?” Wyn Cooper’s The Unraveling asks us. If you answer I don’t know, read this book. If you answer both, stop what you’re doing, and read it while you can. Either way, Cooper wastes no words as his poetry investigates the kinds of changing circumstances no one is spared. If you’ve ever been “to an island/of pain in a sea/of indifference” or felt in danger of falling apart, this book will take you in, search along with you, and offer you a means to survive."
— Dara Barrois/Dixon
