Our faces express a wide range of emotions, but with masking restrictions during Covid, we all had to learn to listen more carefully and read emotions through people's eyes. Some of the poems in this book directly express those feelings of isolation and it is a theme which influences the entire collection.
Reflecting on the notion of "the persistence of memory" and immortality, Cooper writes eloquently about his own memories as well as dreams. He writes, "It is almost as if dreams are storehouses for memories themselves, perhaps another form of immortality."
Both profound and straightforward in its insightfulness, The Face of Everything celebrates the everyday moments of joy and contentment as well as those of loss and sorrow. Here are poems of rejoicing and of grieving that can teach us how to inhabit the world with gentleness towards all living things.
This new collection of Allan Cooper's work also provides vivid images of nature, particularly in his home province of New Brunswick, and his powerful, meditative poems ultimately profess his enduring understanding and appreciation of compassion and love.

Allan Cooper has published nineteen collections of poetry, including Everything We've Loved Comes Back to Find Us (Gaspereau Press, 2017), Toward the Country of Light: New and Selected Poems (Pottersfield Press, 2018), and Waiting for the Small Ship of Desire (Pottersfield Press, 2020). He has twice won the Alfred G. Bailey Award for poetry and received The Fiddlehead Poetry Book Prize of the New Brunswick Book Awards in 2018 and 2021. He is the founder of Owl's Head Press and has been the editor of the intermittently published literary journal Germination since 1982. Cooper is also a songwriter and performer. His recent musical projects include Rosedale and Songs for a Broken World. He divides his time between his ancestral home in Alma, New Brunswick, and Riverview.

Allan Cooper's profile page