I’m really pleased to introduce my new book When the Birds Came.
It shares new poems and takes you through my year. A year when the birds came.
When the Birds Came is available now from Rose at: rosecook108@gmail.com at £5 plus p&p
warmest wishes to you,
Rose
What people are saying:
So many of the poems really speak to me
they drew me on like a story
love the shape-shifting link between angels, birds, flight and our own creature selves
magic!
just £4 plus p+p from Rose 🤍
I am happy to announce a slim volume of new poems –
Shedding Feathers: Rose Cook published by Hen Run at Grey Hen Press
now available from me or email: info@greyhenpress.com
£4 plus p&p
We must be ready for sadness,
fragility, uncertain journeys
or simply to kneel on the ground.
The old ways no longer serve.
– from Dark Feathers
Poems in the Waiting Room project
I am honoured and happy to have my poem Love’s Camel shared in a poetry card to be left in medical waiting rooms, rest homes, hospices and prisons throughout New Zealand. The poems are presented in a three-folded A4 pamphlet, printed on both sides of the card. These free cards may be read and left on site or taken away for sharing or further reading.
Each poetry card contains a children’s poem, a haiku, plus poems from NZ and international poets.
The poems are also transcribed into Braille, bound into booklets and distributed to interested members of the sight-impaired community.
Seeing — that noticing of what’s around us — is something we take for granted. It’s a part of the totality of being aware. Rose Cook’s opening poem, ‘Sightings’, draws attention to the impact of sudden sights, where unexpected immediacy comes as a shock —
Saw the whale flex its muscular back against blue water,
not far out, the shiver of a god.
Saw a seal make her way along the shore,
head round and black, slow flippers, trawling a sea
pink with sunset. Saw it.
By omitting the ‘I’ and going straight for the verb, along with repeating ‘saw’ three times in only five lines, she gives her poem the equivalent of rapid jotting. This takes the reader directly to the visual experiences; they’re right before your eyes.
Yet the personal is still present in the two-word sentence ‘Saw it’. The ‘I’ is not just implied, but thumping the table. That ‘Saw it’ made me recognise how Cook gives foreground to both the whale and the seal. If you remove this sentence fragment from the poem, the two sightings are slower, more reflective; put it back in and you have two words that say, in effect, Me! Me! I was the one who saw it! It was me! (My re-wording is clumsy but I hope it makes the point.) In two words Cook has condensed the knocked-sideways excitement and speed of seeing that makes the animal world vivid.
If the whole pamphlet were written with this intensity, the impact would be lost. What Cook achieves in Sightings is a demonstration of the various speeds with which we might see detail and action in the natural environment.
‘Dance’, for example, is a considered record of ‘whirling insect clouds’ that last all day.
‘Watching them dive’ lingers over the movements of gannets and tern as they dive for fish; here the act of watching is slower, allowing for comparison.
I began to think about the synonyms for ‘see’, and their differences: watch, look, spot, observe — you can add to the list.
It’s that snappy ‘Saw it’ that pointed the way.
reviewer from Sphinx
Rose Cook 