Common Life

by Robert Cording

Common Life looks at the various meanings of common, especially its senses of familiar and widely known; belong or relating to the community at large; and its twinned notions of simple and rudimentary and vulgar and profane. The book’s perspective is religious, and is grounded in the epigraph from the “Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him.” The “waiting” that is required has to do with three first, our desire, as Charles Wright puts it, “to believe in belief” rather than believe; secondly, the need for a setting aside of the self, an abandonment of “every attempt to make something of oneself, even…a righteous person” in the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer; and thirdly, the “waiting” must be as Eliot wrote in the Four Quartets a waiting “without hope for hope would be hope of the wrong thing.” If we learn to wait in these ways, the final section of the book suggests that we have the chance of opening ourselves to all that is graceful within life’s common bounds.

Genres: Poetry

132 pages, Paperback

First published May 31, 2006

Reviews

[Dan Gobble · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great collection of poems with depth and substance such as I've not read in a good while. I'll be searching out more of Mr. Cording's books of poetry!

Some favorite lines:

From "Yard Sale" (The last 12 lines):

Hours gone, no buyers in sight,
We wonder if anyone has seen the signs
We posted across the river.

A dog barks. We circle aimlessly,
As of our own yard's become a hell
Of things we're forced to wander

Among, each object something we have
No use for, a ghostly reminder
Of the life we never gave it,

A history of what did not happen
The way we meant it to and now,
Unwittingly, a history we cannot escape.



From "Talking Through the Storm"

. . .
Then, though it's hate I want to feel for
Their cold contempt, or to escape my own
Confusion, I find myself telling you a story,

An old rabbinic parable. There's a murder
Within the city walls. Who the killer is
Seems less important than what every citizen
Must do: come to the synagogue and pray

For forgiveness. That old question:
What made the killer hate enough to kill?
What made those ordinary teenagers hate
Is beyond our knowing, though we know,

If only in part, the never-satisfied appetite
Of evil. We, too, must pray if, for no other reason,
Those boys never felt the grace of living --
No matter how we stumble and knock about --

In a world where love is possible,
And the whole entire lot of us has somehow
Been kept from our own destruction,
If only barely. . . .

[Ci · Rating 5 out of 5]

What drew me to this collection was a friend's recommendation of the "The Weeper". I saw what he understood of certain religious experience, in the case of St. Ignatius of Loyola. With a few exceptions, the rest of collection is observations of how commonplace is that kind of religious experience, if one is to take into the encountering of the world though a thoughtful heart. It is more mystical than pious, more of a rumination; in my reading, Cording seems to show a life lit by a mystic light can be very subtly different indeed.

[Aaron Stokes · Rating 4 out of 5]

A brilliant collection of poems on the comic and tragic (though altogether beautiful) events that make up this thing we all have in common: life. Cording is a skillful wordsmith, able to reveal the divine in the completely ordinary.

[Jenni Simmons · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a rereader. Excellent.