The Van Gogh Notebook

by Peter Cooley

A reissuing of The Van Gogh Notebook, poems by Peter Cooley.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2004

About the author

Peter Cooley (b. 1940) is an acclaimed American poet and a professor at Tulane University in New Orleans. Cooley received his undergraduate education at Shimer College, where he enrolled via the school's early entrance to college program and graduated in 1962. His graduate education he acquired at the University of Chicago and the University of Iowa, where he also attended the famous Iowa Writers' Workshop. As of 2012, Cooley has published nine volumes of poetry. (from Shimer College Wiki)

Reviews

[Janée Baugher · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first book of ekphrastic poems that I've read. Brilliant, illuminating. Cooley is definitely the grandfather of ekphrasis. Read this book in order to journey through the art of van Gogh. Read this book to escape the mundane stronghold of your common life. Read this book to study craft elements of ekphrastic writing. Without this book, I never could have written THE EKPHRASTIC WRITER.

[NFN Päv · Rating 1 out of 5]

I wanted to like this. It came across as a dry exercise which individual pieces failed to take on their own life outside the paintings that inspired them. The often unmemorable and uninspiring verse seemed incapable of capturing anything but forced emotion. I was also troubled by the fact that almost every subject's mind he stepped into seemed to carry a heavy dose of condescension of their status and personality. I'm sure this was an attempt to make them interesting, perhaps even memorable, but it came across as if all Van Gogh's subjects were undesirables and mostly unaware of it. It's too stuffy and pretentious to come across as a high school exercise, but I would liken it maybe to a university creative writing final project: it's complete, but it has a long way to go before one could ever describe it as "working." I liked the premise, but this was a miss I won't be returning to for a deeper read.