Silences for Love Poems, 1993-1997

David Cope's fifth book, Silences for Love, is framed in elegies, prophet Martin King to old friend Allen Ginsberg, opening with lights fading & flaring over Lake Superior, closing with one leaf in the hidden meadow. Here are the weary traveler & one-eyed boy, Gettysburg sundown, sighs over Sarajevo & massacre at the Patriarch's tomb, snowstorm canoe trip ending with a brother beneath Northern Lights-deaths & weddings, reunions in companion love, Oklahoma City trail of tears, asking blessing to learn healing. Here too are long silence & welcome home: in aging harlequin & his gypsy, in the runes of the Two-Hearted River, in dreams & visions going & coming, memory of a lost friend trapped on corpse detail, rush hour traffic jam, old bridge & hidden meadow, snowstorm near-death car crash, old friend fired hence with a last call for love, free clothes, & newly unfurling leaf. Silences for Love also offers "skillful technique, attention to minute particulars & variable foot," continuing to extend the demotic traditions of American poetry established by Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and Charles Reznikoff.