Cording, Robert 1949-

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CORDING, Robert 1949-

PERSONAL: Born September 21, 1949, in Englewood, NJ; son of Robert and Muriel (Durham) Cording; married July 31, 1982; children: Robert, Daniel, Thomas. Education: Montclair State University, B.A., 1971; Boston College, Ph.D., 1977. Religion: Lutheran.

ADDRESSES: Home—100 Shields Rd., Woodstock, CT 06281. Offıce—Department of English, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA 01610. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Poet and writer. Holy Cross College, Worcester, MA, English professor and holder of James N. and Sara O'Reilly Barrett Chair of Creative Writing. Poet in residence, Frost Place and Chautauqua Writer's Center.

AWARDS, HONORS: Pushcart Prize, 2002; Ohio State University Press/Journal Award for Poetry, for Lifelist; Narrative Poetry Prize, New England Review; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry; two poetry fellowships, Connecticut Commission on the Arts.

WRITINGS:

Life-list (poetry), Ohio State University Press (Columbus, OH), 1987.

What Binds Us to This World (poetry), Copper Beech Press (Providence, RI), 1991.

Heavy Grace (poetry), Alice James Books (Farmington, ME), 1996.

(Editor, with Shelli Jankowski-Smith and E. J. Miller Laino) In My Life: Encounters with the Beatles, Fromm International Publishing, (New York, NY), 1998.

Against Consolation (poetry), CavanKerry Press (Fort Lee, NJ), 2002.

Work represented in anthologies, including Best Spiritual Writing, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2004; Poets of the New Century; and The Breath of Parted Lips.

SIDELIGHTS: From first to last, Robert Cording's books have been cited by critics for the poet's wisdom and clarity of vision. His debut volume, published by Ohio State University Press, won that university's first poetry award. Louis McKee commented in a Library Journal review of Life-list on the "seamless, joyous flow of images" found in lines like these: "I would like to sit on the restful slopes/Of the supporting lawn and talk/In the simplest words, as if I knew/What my life has meant." McKee noted Cording's poetic vision and the way his language transformed everyday occurrences into unforgettably beautiful moments: "In fact, you'll wonder why you never saw it quite like that before," the reviewer commented.

McKee's enthusiasm was similarly described in M. Waters's review of the volume in Choice; Waters called it "an impressive debut of a voice already distinctive and mature." Waters was affected by the affirmative tone of Cording's poems and welcomed his "unambitious wisdom." The reviewer recommended the book to all contemporary poetry collections in public, high school, and college libraries.

Cording's volume What Binds Us to This World received a thoughtful review by Marilyn Nelson Waniek in the Southern Review. Waniek considered the ways in which Cording could be called "a poet of grief." She began by noting the privilege that seems to underlie Cording's life, the "likable world" he inhabits: "composed of pastoral New England landscapes, European travel, functional and apparently affluent families, and happy marriages." Waniek mentioned that such a world may alienate readers who are convinced that "poetry only comes from states of excess and intensity," while "Cording is a poet of quiet joy." But she also found forms of grieving in Cording's work and sensitivity not only to his family's luck, but to the ephemeral nature of that luck.

To illustrate this point, Waniek quoted the poem "Rounds," in which Cording writes, "The news is over: again a night/Of events too large and terrible to grasp,/ The mind's last stance a stunned disbelief/Against a world it can't admit." In "Starlings," Cording writes of a question posed by a Bible salesman: "What do you think/Of all the destruction and doom you see in the world?" Later, he discusses the question with friends, "and talk turned to this world of terror/And uncertainty, to a history long accustomed to hatred/And slaughter, and then that talked turned to us:/Why have a child in this kind of world?" Contemplating the return of starlings to their nest in the eaves of his house, Cording finds an answer to that question in them, and their "blind hunger/For life in the eaves, that chaos of furious clicks/And slurrings that kept on all that summer our child/Insisted at the boundaries of your nestling flesh." Waniek called "the grief of this book . . . the grief of the lucky man," who can find in the starlings' nest "the web of love which hope spins over nothingness."

While What Binds Us to This World is as full of psalms of joy and thanks as it is of questions about the ill fates that meet so many of us, the later collection Heavy Grace takes on human loss more centrally. Poems like "The Mouth of Grief," "After the Funeral," and "Washing the Body" suggest a shift in Cording's subject matter, which includes the death of his grandmother. Bill Christophersen, reviewing the volume for Poetry, still found "psalms of joy" . . . "buttressing the elegies" at the center of Cording's book. He especially noted poems like "Pop-Up Book," which describes how the fold-outs of a children's book, like "Advent-calendar doors," let the reader enter "One improbable world/Giving way to another." "When he finds such particular images," Christophersen wrote, "his poems lift off the page." This reviewer also found "images so conventional . . . the reader may wonder if anything fresh is likely to surface." Still, Christophersen concluded, "Heavy Grace is an unflinching and affecting treatment of painful subjects and ultimate themes."