Bowl
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Bowl, Elizabeth Cook’s first collection, expresses a dynamic passivity in which openness to the weight and texture of experience is met by containment. A central sequence traces the pressure which a grievous passage of family history continues to exert on later generations.
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Bowl, Elizabeth Cook’s first collection, expresses a dynamic passivity in which openness to the weight and texture of experience is met by containment. A central sequence traces the pressure which a grievous passage of family history continues to exert on later generations.
Bowl
Give me a bowl, wide
and shallow. Patient
to light as a landscape open
to the whole weight
of a deepening sky.
Give me a bowl which turns
for ever on a curve
so gentle a child
could bear it and beasts
lap fearless at its low rim.
Published: October 2006; reprinted March 2013
ISBN: 978-1-905208-09-8
Pages: 80
“These poems speak with the immediacy and fierce honesty of recorded thoughts. Exploring the world for the small gestures, the real details that act as revelation, she is both a celebrant and a custodian of memory. Her vision is eloquent and profoundly humane.”
Martha Kapos
“These are poems that combine boldness and honesty of thought with remarkable delicacy of expression, facing the fullness of experience with a stubborn, patient accuracy that never forgets that the world comes in touching, precise detail. Elizabeth Cook has a very distinctive style, almost a prose-writer’s thoroughness, but forced into poetry, so to speak, by its intensity and brevity. I am put in mind of Marianne Moore, but Cook is tougher than Moore…”
D.M. Black
Elizabeth Cook was born in Gibraltar in 1952, spent her childhood in Nigeria and Dorset, and these days lives in East London. She is the editor of the Oxford Authors John Keats, author of Achilles (Methuen and Picador USA), a work of fiction with a performance life, and of Lux (Scribe), a novel encompassing the Scriptural story of David and Bathsheba and that of the Tudor poet, Thomas Wyatt. Her poetry, short fiction and critical reviews have appeared in journals including Agenda, The London Review of Books, Poetry London, Stand, Moving Worlds and Tears in the Fence. She wrote the libretto for Francis Grier’s The Passion of Jesus of Nazareth, jointly commissioned by VocalEssence in Minneapolis and the BBC, and has since collaborated with Grier on a sequence of poems for a Vespers, premiered in 2014 at King’s College Chapel, and a Nativity oratorio, Before All Worlds. She has been a Hawthornden Fellow and is currently a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Queen Mary University. In addition to the full collections published by Worple she has published a pamphlet, The Sound of the Rain, with the Garlic Press (2017).
