Quarantine Poems
Joan was featured in The Cambridge Spy on February 6, 2021
Listen to Joan read
“Cakes, Pies, & Fancy French Pastries”
Selection from "October Assateague"
Dark birds float on flat water,
Hardly recognized as the ocean today.
It is deep blue, rarely breaking, and then
Rolling into a gentle slap just before the sand,
The way the river used to do to the bulkheads
At home, shoving into them playfully.
These dark birds—not the usual brown pelicans,
Hunt alone or comingle with odd seagulls,
The gulls that look prehistoric, gigantic.
They glide over the water and spy the right
Spot to land and then just sit. No diving,
Eating, or scouting except for a place to
Float with the rollers just before
They nudge the shore.
Artwork--Ashley Lewis--KHS 2022
In this impressive debut collection of poems, Birds Like Me, novelist Joan Drescher Cooper proves to be as adept in verse as she is in prose. Cooper’s musical lyrics arise from the narrative ground to transcend the daily quotidian as gracefully as Shakespeare’s lark …arising/From sullen earth sings hymns at heaven’s gate…
–Nancy Mitchell– recipient of a Pushcart Prize in Poetry, author of The Near Surround, Grief Hut and The Out-of-Body Shop
Joan Drescher Cooper is a compassionate wise woman whose collision with family dynamics explodes off the page with an insistent search for meaning. She teaches us to respect the comings and goings of our daily drills. If poetry is about turning the physical into the metaphysical, she has the knack. In the very first poem, I loved the line – “Night sweeps color into its pocket.”
–Gerald Sweeney—reviewer and author of the The Columbiad series including Comes the Electric Circus, Eagles Rising, First Lights, Crashing into Sunrise, A Tournament of a Distinguished White Order, Yo Columbia! and Wizard Ho!
Listen to an excerpt: “The Sky Holds Blue”