What's Possible

W.H. Auden said about poetry: “there is only one thing / that all poetry must do; it must praise all it can for being / and for happening.” For forty years, Robert Cording’s poems have sought to praise a world that need not be, but is. His poems embrace what cannot be changed: that living brings us face-to-face with suffering and injustice, beauty and grace. From the start, his work has explored three questions: Why does it feel that life is “good,” even in the face of so much suffering and grief? How can he be grateful for what he has been given despite the almost daily onslaught of affliction and sorrow in the world? How, finally, can he not only embrace, but praise the opposing sides of what’s possible: the utter grief and utter joy of being alive? In the words of poet Eamon Grennan, Cording is always “transforming his naturalist’s scrutiny of the world into moral interrogation, bringing to our attention, in poem after poem, ‘the strangeness we were born to.’” What’s Possible: New and Selected Poems makes clear what many have long known: that Robert Cording is among his generation’s finest poets, and that his work has been both deeply consistent and yet constantly evolving. Here is a poet both unsparing and generous, a voice that has always heeded Shakespeare’s injunction to “speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.”