This collection brings together Allan Cooper's best poems over the last forty years. He weaves visions of nature with insight into the workings of the human heart. Read them individually or read them as a single long, flowing and eloquent narrative. The meditative and compassionate observations will transport the reader from the chaos of everyday life into a healing realm of possibility.

In Toward the Country of Light, the author offers open sonnets, prose poems, ghazals, small poems inspired by the Chinese and Japanese, and poems influenced by Robert Bly and Francis Ponge. As Cooper observes, "Over the years I've come to understand that the poem itself usually demands the form it takes and that language uses us for its own secret purposes."

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