David McCooey

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Biographical note:  David McCooey is an award-winning, and widely published, poet and critic. His first collection of poetry, Blister Pack, won the Mary Gilmore Award and was short-listed for four other major Australian literary awards. He is the Deputy General Editor of the award-winning Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature (published internationally as The Literature of Australia). He is associate professor at Deakin University in Victoria.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844717590
ISBN:  9781844717590
Author:  David McCooey
Title:  Outside
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  DCF
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  03-Dec-11
Extent:  84pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  7 mm
Weight:  126 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  Outside is the second full-length collection from the prize-winning poet David McCooey. Taking the most basic of categories—day and night, inside and outside—McCooey makes them the source of powerful meditations on the strangeness of our diurnal lives. In the resonant landscapes of these poems, the domestic slides into the universal, the personal becomes the historical, and the cultural is the real. Outside is always unsettling, but it is, too, always humane.

Main description:  Outside is the second full-length collection from the prize-winning poet David McCooey. Outside takes the most basic of categories—day and night, inside and outside—and makes them the source of powerful meditations on the strangeness of our diurnal lives. In the resonant landscapes of these poems, the domestic slides into the universal, the personal becomes the historical, and the cultural is the real. This is a deeply unified work, even as it encompasses reflections on such diverse topics as the number 5, hands, newborn infants, heaven, anger, and rock music. The collection also features a number of major sequences, including ‘A Short History of Night’, and an electrifying response to the films of Stanley Kubrick. The book is also finely balanced in another way: by a generous and unique sense of humour, demonstrated in the dadaist and hilarious ‘intermission’. Outside is always unsettling, but it is, too, always humane.

Table of contents:
One
Another Dream
A.M.
Exteriors
Landscape/Psyche
Illness
Hands,
5
Two Figures
Heaven
Yield
Car
Memory & Slaughter
Drinking with My Brother
On Wasting Time
There
Blackbird Summer
Rock Music
Trains
Travelling
Inca Kola
Intermission
Rejected New Yorker Cartoons
More Mutant Proverbs
Two Found Poems
Shorts
Two
Migration
Night Frequencies
Evening
Sleep
Night Light
Trio of Dips
An Obscene Poem
American Movie
After Kubrick
Curse
Anger
(Weldon Kees)
A Short History of Night

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Excerpt from book:  

After Kubrick

(i) An Essay on The Shining

A hotel is not a house.
      The length of a corridor
is the length of a mirror halved.
      A tricycle articulates
the uncanny difference
      between floorboard and carpet.
The Steadicam is a nervous
      energy, a kind of music.
The music is a kind of
      violence. The violence—when it
comes—is a kind of intimation
      of the real thing, like
the stilted dialogue, the
      hysterical typewriter (first blue,
then white), and the shadow
      of a helicopter on the car
in the film’s opening sequence
      (with its synthesised Dies Irae).
The style of the blood
      filling the lobby; the archly
symmetrical shots; the
      characters caught in reflections;
the seduction of numerology—
      all of these are realised
in a struggle with the sincerely
      ugly: the drinking, the man
fixed in the labyrinth of his
      rage, lost in the Indian
reservation of his long-forgotten
      crimes. (The African-American
is also historically accurate).
      What becomes of the boy,
we wonder, once we have safely
      seen his father’s corpse, frozen
in the achromatic salt
      of a pure, factitious snow.

Unpublished endorsement:  David McCooey is one of the most controlled and attentive poets writing in Australia. He allows a book to evolve over a period of time, and is willing to wait until the right poem comes. He never forces a line, never wastes a poem. For him, writing poetry is a serious art that has purpose and goes out into the world loaded with implication. Renowned as a critic as well as a poet, McCooey's careful study of poetry is shown in his poems, but they never rely only on this learning and consideration of craft. They sparkle with necessity and deeply felt insight into how one discusses the many layers of conducting a life. This remarkable book almost liberates an aesthetics, and is in itself a work of great beauty mixed with moments of biting satire. There is superb balance in this combination. The language is skilfully shaped and wielded, and the considerations deadly. Film, family life, raising a child, concerns with the mechanisms of ‘culture’ and ‘ways of seeing', all overlap and segue into each other. McCooey takes risks in subtle and complex ways. Intertexts with thinkers like Winnicott form major threads while an engagement with Stanley Kubrick's films form others. This is a book of devastating frankness, and of great tenderness, but it is never overly delicate or polite. There's no voice much like it in Australian poetry, though at times it reminds me of some South American poets, and certainly of some French poets. It's the wit, the aphoristic turn just when it's needed, both within poems and within the timing of the book as a whole. McCooey has become entirely his own poet – genuinely good and essential. Read him!

John Kinsella

Previous review quote:  In David McCooey’s latest collection, a chapbook honouring filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, and memoir-poems from his own childhood, there is a line, “the primitive violence of eating.” That’s the kind of killer line McCooey always nails. The gentle folk of polite society may make a dinner party the most civilised of events, but it’s just primitive violence when you look at someone chewing. McCooey in a few words evokes the whole awful spectacle. He reminds us that everything, even beauty, is the sum of a whole lot of little violences. His gift—to get a detail in one shot, one brief line, not a word out of kilter—is the hallmark of his imagery.

I would rather read his poetry than that of anyone else of his generation.

Craig Sherborne

Previous review quote:  The poems in Graphic take strength and originality from the way they combine opposites. On the one hand, studies of Kubrick films and animal slaughter, they are straightforwardly fierce; but they achieve their effects in a manner remarkably controlled and subtle. They work with short lines and understatement, yet they are forever surprising you with brilliant images and perceptions. In fact, they recall Raymond Carver in the way their tone is intimate, but their effect uncanny.

Lisa Gorton