Only So Far

Name: Only So Far
SKU: 4878
Price: 16.00 USD
Availability: InStock

Robert Cording

$16.00

In Only So Far, Cording’s poetry vacillates between complaint and praise, lamenting and loving our “sowre-sweet dayes” as George Herbert’s poem “Bittersweet” puts it. Behind the book lies the story of the Promised Land that Moses never quite reaches, and those “little daily miracles” that Virginia Woolf says stand in as a kind of recompense for the “great revelation” that never does come.
Poets and poetry readers will embrace Cording’s eighth book of poems. His work is of interest to librarians and ministers in seminary programs.

Categories: All Books, Notable Voices, Poetry, Robert Cording Tags: notable voices, Only So Far, Robert Cording

Meet the Author

ROBERT CORDING teaches English and creative writing at College of the Holy Cross where he is Professor of English and Barrett Professor of Creative Writing. He has published seven collections of poems: Life-list (Ohio State University Press/Journal award, 1987); What Binds Us To This World (Copper Beech Press, 1991); Heavy Grace (Alice James, 1996); Against Consolation (CavanKerry, 2002); Common Life (CavanKerry, 2006); Walking With Ruskin (CavanKerry, 2010); and A Word in My Mouth: Selected Spiritual Poems (Wipf and Stock, 2013).

Critic Reviews

Only So Far is a perfectly wonderful book. I say “perfectly” not as a gush word but because, true to its etymology fromperfectus, “thoroughly made, accomplished, fully realized,” the book is one thoroughly, fully realized poem after another, his voice and its language seeking out the importance of even such a slight thing as breaking open a leaf of mint and experiencing its clean sweet smell […] Over and over, in this book, such gifts are offered. The quiet voice in these poems, calmly studying its own experience, cannot avoid the knowledge of its own mastery and its capacity to offer such pleasures. Hence the beautiful serene authority of its writing, its versification, its syntactical elegance.
— David Ferry

Robert Cording’s poems are so stripped-down, so lacking in affectation they almost fly beneath the radar. Almost. Except for the fact that every few stanzas, every few lines, something strobes forth to make us catch our breath: an arrow of wit, a shot of pure sorrow, the ripple of an apparently effortless interior rhyme. Cording weds eye to heart and intellect to mystery with a power that devastates, arouses, and not infrequently delivers startling consolation.
— Leah Hager Cohen