The Home Place

"Cooley makes important use of the evolution of some of the major poems by reference to the manuscripts and typescripts of drafts and makes an especially fruitful case for Seed Catalogue." -- Anne Burke * Prairie Journal of Canadian Literature *
"...[The Home Place] builds a magnificent bridge across the coulee between writer and reader... Comprehensive and intense, The Home Place unpacks Kroetsch's long poems The Ledger, Seed Catalogue and The Sad Phoenician. It dives into the very marrow of those works and accomplishes brilliant and suggestive explorations of the feints and allusions that make them great... Cooley and Kroetsch partner one another, dance with the words they both love and respect." -- Aritha van Herk * Alberta Views *
'"Dennis Cooley has written a remarkable monograph on Robert Kroetsch that focuses primarily on a handful of his books of long poems.Cooley weaves an astute criticism of Kroetsch’s writing with details of Kroetsch’s private life, with an enquiry into being a writer, and with covering (and responding to) a great deal of previous Kroetsch scholarship....making for an acute study that covers an enormous critical range." [Full review at http://www.prairiefire.ca/the-home-place-essays-on-robert-kroetschs-poetry/] -- Nicole Markotić * Prairie Fire *
"Cooley paints Kroetsch (1927–2011) as a Canadian Weldon Kees, as a man well known in certain circles as a celebrated writer, effuse in his friendships yet wandering much of his life and, like Odysseus, never quite sure of home.... Kroetsch had a passion for lists, for cataloging, his language catapulting emotion like the language of Gertrude Stein. One can read into his work the influence of Walt Whitman and Mark Twain, language without sentiment, crisp lines without meandering. Kroetsch’s language pulls readers into his world, where the heroes spend their time alone, repeating words, creating new meanings. Cooley’s collection reflects on the enigma of Kroetsch and the life of a poet in the 20th century. Recommended." -- K. Gale * Choice Magazine *
"Cooley reads with a scrupulous, tactful, alert sense of his own vocabulary, of his subject’s languaging... [P]age after page I found Cooley riddling nuance and gap to surprise me with a meaning I’d never contemplated, a measured un-meaning. He embraces Kroetsch’s 'grammatical twiddling' with affectionate care. He patiently engages Kroetsch’s lingo and its talky syntax... The poet-critic makes for good reading. His vocabulary provokes and amuses... Reading The Home Place, we believe we know more about writer and writing—and about the home place." [Full review at https://canlit.ca/article/irrepressible/] -- Laurie Ricou * Canadian Literature *
"[Cooley's] critical approach rests somewhere in that con-fusion of poetry and criticism. Cooley reads with a scrupulous, tactful, alert sense of his own vocabulary, of his subject’s languaging.... Just such a collision of verbs—rhyming and alliterating and doubling as nouns—typifies the irrepressible flurry of Kroetsch writing to Cooley writing to Kroetsch.... The poet-critic makes for good reading. His vocabulary provokes and amuses.... Lest this tribute imply The Home Place is all wordplay with poet playing poet, I want to recognize how adeptly, if obliquely and subtly, Cooley sets his subject in resonant contexts.... Reading The Home Place, we believe we know more about writer and writing—and about the home place." Canadian Literature 232 (Spring 2017) [Full review at https://canlit.ca/article/irrepressible] -- Laurence (Laurie) Ricou