Green Notebook, Winter Road

by Jane Cooper

Poems deal with nature, family, childhood, aging, dreams, and expression

Genres: Poetry

68 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Jane Cooper was an American poet born in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Cooper attended Vassar College from 1942 to 1944, and earned a B.A. from the University of Wisconsin in 1946. In 1953–54 Cooper took a year off to get an M.A. at the University of Iowa, where she studied with Robert Lowell, and John Berryman in the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Cooper joined the faculty of Sarah Lawrence College, in 1950, and remained as a teacher and poet in residence until her retirement in 1987. She held the post of New York State Poet from 1995 to 1997. She died on October 26, 2007, of complications due to Parkinson's Disease.

Reviews

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I forget who recommended this to me. I think it was Marie Howe, but it might have been Suzanne Gardinier. And she recommended it to show me how to write poems that hold the possibilities open instead of closing them off. Around the same time, I had to have "negative capability" explained to me like one thousand times because I couldn't understand it for the life of me. Or I could understand it and then I would forget what it meant immediately. (Kind of like learning the floss, as I think of it. I'd get it and then lose it immediately.) THESE poems, however, finally taught me what negative capability was and they stunned me then--and still now--with their ability to ponder and think in real time and then just . . . drift off but still remain satisfying.