Matthew Cooperman, the atmosphere is not a perfume it is odorless

 

Precarity

To see and be seen
by others

not the voice
but the face

voice in the face
mouthward

the warbler
now
in the coffee tree
broken and free

*

In hunger     by migration
to see the living
and be seen
to have taken it in

the scene and all
its decline

the moving picture
in sepia hues

the map made body
blushing blue

blood     a precipitate folly
in wheat or oil

rainfall’s mean
in the morning dew

For some time now, I’ve admired Fort Collins poet and editor Matthew Cooperman his ability to compose book-length collections, and even certain poems and individual lines, of sprawling distance, ecological concern, geographic acknowledgement, cultural touchstones and lyric expansiveness, all set in a Colorado he loves dearly. The author of a handful of titles, including Spool (Anderson SC: Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2016), NOS (disorder, not otherwise specified) (with Aby Kaupang; Futurepoem, 2018) [see my review of such here] and Wonder About The (Middle Creek Publishing, 2023) [see my review of such here], his latest solo collection is the atmosphere is not a perfume it is odorless (Anderson SC: Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2024). The lyrics of the atmosphere is not a perfume it is odorless weave and incorporate strands of contemporary and cultural alongside accompanying full-colour photographs that feel as much as part of the text as the writing, extending a sense of time and timelessness, but one that stretches his lyric of human destruction of the landscape to one that includes even deeper anxiety, citing gun culture, politics and domestic matters. “Innocence,” he writes, across the extended title poem, “being, / lost or being found out, my sense of time goes in and out of phase with // what must be yours, I know I feel it, dispersed and sometimes not / dispersed, as if I am gas also speaking to you, which of course I am, / the punchline of poetry. Are we always going to go over how I or you // do or not smell the haloing over the Front Range?”

Cooperman writes of an American cultural expansiveness, even through one of deep uncertainty. “As in, O America, aren’t you tired of being an ode,” he offers, as part of “Gun Ode.” He writes of precarity and odes, through poems examine and explore cultural space and seek out its humanity, aching to flesh out something different across the habits of decades. Later, in the same extended poem, writing: “If the impulse to destruction is greater than the insight to love / we are doomed to a garden of graves // If freedom is money spent on guns, what is American grace?” His poems stretch as endless as does that view, which is glorious and open, a tinge of fresh, cool air among the biting dust.

In the end, his is a love for country, culture and space as deep and as wide as any horizon, one unafraid to love critically and out loud. “Not motive or asseveration. Not a result of living as experiment,” he writes, as part of “No Ode,” “but living together. Every lab a vial filled. Not a sea / full of oil, nor an office full of bluster. Not a corporation / nor the October morning moving / to incorporate a neighborhood.”