Bird on a Wire

Dennis Cooley shares insight into his newest long poem  love in a dry land.

Congratulations on the upcoming launch of love in a dry land!

love in a dry land is quite obviously set in the Canadian Prairies. How has this landscape informed your body of work?

Dennis Cooley: It's always been the space I feel most essential in. The enormous sweep of the sky and the landscape seems close and intimate to me. I almost never write about landscape, but the elements, though—the wind and the sun and rain—they're everywhere when I write out of the place, as I do here. I can hardly write a line without a mention of sun and light.

love in a dry land is a gorgeous title. What is your approach to naming your work? How did you land on 'love in a dry land' for this particular book?

Dennis Cooley: The "dry land" suggested itself not long after I turned to the Ross novel and to my own inscriptions of the place. I grew up in Estevan, which experiences more hours of sunshine than any other centre in Canada. It was also pretty dry, though not as dry as the decade that informs As for Me and My House. The pertinent part of the prairies had been identified as part of Palliser's Triangle noted as inhospitable to agriculture. It became evident that writing the land could sway between states of wet and dry. The pattern led to the other part of the title. Ross's novel opened a subtle, almost repressed, and not always recognized line that I wanted to take further. The characters in my response were more emotional and more erotic than his. More jocular too. Their love story bumped through droughts and yearnings for spring rains.

You've had a lifelong interest in Sinclair Ross's As for Me and My House. What is it about Ross's work and this book in particular that captures your attention?

Dennis Cooley: I grew up in Saskatchewan at the end of WW II. when memories of the Dirty Thirties, as we called the depression, were still strong. My parents talked about what it was to have lived through those years. They talked about the salted cod and the shrivelled apples at the railway relief depots; farmers paying more for freight than they got for the livestock they shipped. They talked about Tommy Douglas and people saying there was no money, then finding a geyser of money for the war. I had a sense of those times.

The severe drought had ended, but its effects had not. For many reasons a sense of restraint and understatement persisted. Some were hesitant to exult or even rejoice. They were not unmoved, they found it hard to let go. How do you step out after years in disappointment and restraint? I find the brevity and simplicity of their language strongly moving. There was so much not spoken in their talk.

I was struck by the pinched lives in Ross. The emotion is especially evident in stories such as "Cornet at Night," where a young boy turns to a musician, inexplicably arrived at the family farm, to say “Play it—play it now—just a little bit to let me hear.” In another scene in As for Me and My House the couple around whom the story revolves step into the yard one night. They have been enmeshed in heat and dust, and they are worn by their frustrations as artists in a puritanical world. This night they have heard a dance band playing a little way off. The music reaches all the way the into their house and they are drawn out to where it holds them in the dark, listening. The husband says, almost helplessly, to his wife, I suppose we could dance a little here, if we knew how. Ross is good at depicting their anguish when a larger life seems so far away.

I hear in Ross the unsaid and the unlived. People did dance, I know—more freely than I myself ever did. But I wonder if in the rest of their lives they danced as they might have wished? I'm remembering them when I write these poems.

In Ross I also see a world I could recognize and a world he honored. He was one of the first to write powerfully out of the prairies. I was moved and grateful in reading Ross, and again when I was writing love in a dry land.

 Thank you! Looking forward to launching love in a dry land on October 29th at 7pm CST at McNally Robinson Booksellers!