Review of Listening, Listening by Bob Cooper, pub. Naked Eye Publishing 2023

and I want to remember this, all of this, because it happened.

This last line from “To be continued” highlights two important qualities in Cooper’s poetry: it is observational, and much concerned with everyday life. What he is so anxious to recall is the woman and child who sat in front of him on a bus; their rapport with each other, their apparently slender means. This is all he could glean of them in a short time; there was no actual interaction, but as the title implies, after they got off the bus and vanished from his knowledge their lives went on. This title is actually unusual in pinpointing what for him is central to the poem. Another such, “Elsewhere she’ll fumble her flat’s key into the lock”, again speculates on the part of people’s lives the poet cannot see; in this case unexpectedly humanising an internet troll or scammer. Her fake profile shows her

    in a ribbon-adorned US army uniform
   on a sunlit porch, a tied-back-tight-ponytail-haloed smile,
   and her listed Facebook friends, each with glossy teeth

But the poet wonders about that “elsewhere”:

    how many of them are click-my-box trolls, too,
   in the same fluorescent-lit fourth floor room in St. Petersburg,
   keyboard-clicking demotivational posts on their afternoon shift.
   Will she then wait for a tram with a half-full shopping bag
   cursing herself quietly because, even though it’s pay day
   and she’s bought her son socks, she forgot a lightbulb.
   So, again, she’ll walk the corridor to her flat in the dark.

Some other poems use the first line for a title, even when this is fragmentary – eg “Before sunrise, eating muesli, I decide that”. Others seem to hunt for determinedly “quirky” titles – eg “One of the times when Willie Long-Legs and Laudanum Sam met Mazy Mary and Sarah Snuggles”. Maybe it’s just me, but I tend to feel a thoughtful, thought-provoking title, that you go back to and see new meaning in once you’ve read the poem, is a good sign, an indication that the poet knew what was important enough to make him want to write it and what he wanted his readers to take from it. Also, quirky drives me nuts. So it may be no accident that his observing-everyday-life mode, in which the titles tend to be more sober and considered, is where most of my favourite poems in this collection can be found.

The observation is often quite sharp, as in

   How his smile muscles were so under-used that
  when they twisted, tightened, I was always surprised

from “What the district nurse never included in her report”, and the “clouds of luminous breath” in the autumnal “Those on the ball before darkness surrounds them”. This poem is one of several where he goes beyond observation to find the universal in the particular, and again he is conscious that the people he is watching exist beyond the moment of his poem:

   and everything beyond all this is also here
  in this November afternoon

When not observing life around him, he does a lot of what-iffing, particularly about dead writers – “Rilke in his Audi on the M53”, “O’Hara and Melly meet up in Liverpool”, “M/s Eyre’s lover visits a writers’ course at Lumb Bank” and several more. I think there are a few too many of these and that some begin to sound like exercises. One that does work beautifully is “Almost meeting Keats on the doorstep”, in which tourists entranced by the museum that was Keats’s villa in Rome ignore the “pale-faced twenty-something” on the doorstep who could be Keats and surely has his illness:

   He coughs, smiles politely, asks for one euro so that he can get in.
  They ignore him and keep talking – the bedroom and bed were so tiny.
  Only the wallpaper’s changed. Locals were scared of infection.
  T.B.’s so contagious. Apart from that, it’s the same as when he died.
  They keep chatting, open an umbrella in his face. He turns away.

There are a few typos, notably “Hurworth” for “Haworth” and “MacDonald’s” for “McDonald’s” – that one is surprising, for one of the virtues of this collection is its easy familiarity with contemporary references. Netflix, Facebook, Amazon etc all seem perfectly at home and not dragged in for effect as sometimes happens when poets are desperately trying to keep up with the zeitgeist. And for such a sharp observer, I thought the reference to “pensioners” drinking Ovaltine was a bit of a cliché, but maybe this pensioner is unusual in never having done so…

But though I think it would be a stronger collection with at least 15 pages fewer (almost any collection of 100 pages could afford to lose that many), there is much to enjoy here, perhaps nowhere more so than in the interesting “Miss Roberta Frost and the owls”. This is a sort of reverse sonnet, sestet first and octave second. It is of course partly another what-if, as witness the lady’s name and the echoes from “Acquainted with the Night”. But the character, and the emblematic owl, exist on their own terms, and memorably:

    All she hears is the pad of shoes as her feet
   climb the stairs to undress, lie still, and the cry
   of an owl cruising along his airborne street,
   unseen, always aware, not saying good-bye
   to his mate but telling her where he is – height
   and distance – as he ghosts the empty sky.
   Then he answers her call, turns.