Green Notebook, Winter Road

The ``green notebook'' of Cooper's (Scaffolding) latest collection is an imaginary, imaginative wellspring: ``It seems I am on the edge /of discovering the green notebook containing all the poems of my life,/ I mean the ones I never wrote.'' In Cooper's work, poetry seems to represent this openness of mind, which attunes the poet to future events as well as to new possibilities of expression. Poetry, however, also maintains the same sense of wonder and possibility regarding what has already happened. The past expressed in a new way releases new insights, and so becomes an event in the present: the past can be, literally, revived. As Cooper writes in ``Ordinary Detail,'' ``I'm trying to write a poem that will alert me to my real life,/ a poem written in the natural speech of the breakfast table.'' The first section of the book is entitled ``On the Edge of the Moment''; the sensation of reading Cooper's work as a whole is that of thinking out loud, seeking the temporal and spatial edge where reality is made and unmade. She is not a poet of memorable lines so much as memorable feelings-a writer who adopts a generous, unpossessive attitude toward language, memory and life. (Sept.)