Matthew Cooperman, the atmosphere is not a perfume it is odorless

 

Precarity

To see and be seen
by others

not the voice
but the face

voice in the face
mouthward

the warbler
now
in the coffee tree
broken and free

*

In hunger     by migration
to see the living
and be seen
to have taken it in

the scene and all
its decline

the moving picture
in sepia hues

the map made body
blushing blue

blood     a precipitate folly
in wheat or oil

rainfall’s mean
in the morning dew

Forsome time now, I’ve admired Fort Collins poet and editor Matthew Cooperman hisability to compose book-length collections, and even certain poems and individuallines, of sprawling distance, ecological concern, geographic acknowledgement,cultural touchstones and lyric expansiveness, all set in a Colorado he lovesdearly. The author of a handful of titles, including Spool (Anderson SC:Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2016), NOS (disorder, not otherwise specified) (with Aby Kaupang; Futurepoem, 2018) [see my review of such here] and Wonder About The (Middle Creek Publishing, 2023) [see my review of such here], his latest solo collection is the atmosphere is not a perfume it is odorless (Anderson SC: Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press,2024). The lyrics of the atmosphere is not a perfume it is odorless weaveand incorporate strands of contemporary and cultural alongside accompanying full-colourphotographs that feel as much as part of the text as the writing, extending asense of time and timelessness, but one that stretches his lyric of human destructionof the landscape to one that includes even deeper anxiety, citing gun culture,politics and domestic matters. “Innocence,” he writes, across the extendedtitle poem, “being, / lost or being found out, my sense of time goes in and outof phase with // what must be yours, I know I feel it, dispersed and sometimesnot / dispersed, as if I am gas also speaking to you, which of course I am, /the punchline of poetry. Are we always going to go over how I or you // do ornot smell the haloing over the Front Range?”

Coopermanwrites of an American cultural expansiveness, even through one of deep uncertainty.“As in, O America, aren’t you tired of being an ode,” he offers, as part of “GunOde.” He writes of precarity and odes, through poems examine and explore culturalspace and seek out its humanity, aching to flesh out something different acrossthe habits of decades. Later, in the same extended poem, writing: “If the impulseto destruction is greater than the insight to love / we are doomed to a gardenof graves // If freedom is money spent on guns, what is American grace?” Hispoems stretch as endless as does that view, which is glorious and open, a tingeof fresh, cool air among the biting dust.

Inthe end, his is a love for country, culture and space as deep and as wide asany horizon, one unafraid to love critically and out loud. “Not motive orasseveration. Not a result of living as experiment,” he writes, as part of “NoOde,” “but living together. Every lab a vial filled. Not a sea / full of oil,nor an office full of bluster. Not a corporation / nor the October morningmoving / to incorporate a neighborhood.”