The Gods of Wild Things

Deborah Cooper

I read Deborah Gordon Cooper's The Gods of Wild Things and Bernadette Savage's Sometimes I Call Old Lovers simultaneously, and for about three-quarters of each book I was confident that The Gods of Wild Things was going to get a rating that would dwarf that of the other book. Cooper has it together in every place where Savage does not. Well, okay, most of the time. Hard to argue with lines like

“There is only one tree
she is afraid of,
the giant tree on the way
home from school.
This is a tree that waits to
reach down and grab children…”
(“She Dreams of Trees”)

Yeah, the line breaks need work, but that's a reason to knock off one star, not trash a book.

Then you get to the halfway point in the book, and it takes a sudden and painful turn with a poem called “The Hidden Waterfall.” It is a poem with a MESSAGE, an important one, and as 99% of all poems where the message is “important,” the poetry suffers as a result. Greatly. Horribly. To the point of a poem, a published poem no less, actually using the word “soul” and expecting to get away with it:

“there is something so
unquestionably beautiful;

simply to know
that when I leave,
my whole soul quieted,

this water will keep on
weaving its gauzy light
across these stones…”

(and that's not the part with the MESSAGE. Beware.)

To be fair, the book does recover itself rather quickly and go back on with the stuff that's much better. But “The Hidden Waterfall” sits there almost dead-center like the elephant in the living room, and while most folks are too polite to mention it, that doesn't mean it's not going to be both noticeable and a major obstacle to traffic.