Publication Date: October 2019
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“Cording’s poetry is fearless in his choice of subject. Rather than write quiet, domestic works, he expands each poem to effortlessly encompass themes of death, grief, God, and love.” – ForeWord Review
About Robert Cording
Robert Cording has published eight collections of poems, most recently, Walking with Ruskin and Only So Far. He taught for 38 years at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts, and is a poetry mentor in Seattle Pacific University’s MFA program. He has received two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in poetry and his poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Orion, and many others.
About the Book
Without My Asking takes its cue from Psalms 90’s petition– “teach us to number our days.” That biblical sense of limits– of what we can and cannot know– and the mystery of before and after that encloses our existence is the center around which these poems turn. In poems that attend to the events of our lives– from the deaths of patients to hummingbirds at a bird feeder– these poems work to utter “Yes” to all that happens, that “peculiar affirmative” that recognizes, as Elizabeth Bishop says, “Life’s like that… also death.”
