Peter Cooley, a native of the Midwest and a graduate of Shimer College, the University of Chicago and the Writers' Workshop at University of Iowa, where he received his Ph.D., has lived over half his life in New Orleans; he was Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Tulane University from 1975-2018. He has published eleven books of poetry, ten of them with Carnegie Mellon. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic and in over one hundred anthologies. His eleventh book of poetry The One Certain Thing appeared in 2021. Cooley was an Atlantic Younger Poet, the Robert Frost Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the recipient of an ATLAS grant from the state of Louisiana and of the Marble Faun Poetry Award from the Faulkner Society in New Orleans. He was Poetry Editor of NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW from 1970-2000 and is currently Poetry Editor of CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE, Professor Emeritus at Tulane University and former Louisiana Poet Laureate.

Other poems by Peter Cooley in Verse Daily:
March 28, 2020:   "Advent Poem" "Teach me to read more closely how the sun..."
May 10, 2018:   "Poem for Early Morning, Not an Aubade" "Wonderfully established, the sun across my plate..."
May 13, 2015:   "Nethering" "Heaven is only my next moment here..."
July 28, 2014:   "Washing My Face" "Rising to face him, head-on, man-to-man..."
November 24, 2012:   "Rembrandt, 'Self-Portrait, 1639'" "I heard this from the stars; it must be true..."

Books by Peter Cooley:

Other poems on the web by Peter Cooley:
"Innumerabilities"
"Down autumn"
"The Eighth Sacrament"
"A Café on Magazine Street, New Orleans, September"
Twenty-two poems
Two poems
Five poems
Three poems
Seven poems
"Earthly, Unearthly Measurings"
Three poems
"Pastoral"
"Gate 134"
Two poems
"Third Heaven"
Three poems
"Twenty Line Sonnet"
"Sunday Afternoons With My Sister"
Five poems
"The Climbers"

Peter Cooley's Web site.

About The One Certain Thing:

"Peter Cooley's The One Certain Thing is a book of tender elegies, and therefore, they are love poems that celebrate what was and what could be if loss were not at the foundation of the human condition. More than that, they are romantic love poems that declare everlasting love for the lost lover: "This morning when I woke up, you were here, / an indentation in the sheets." And just as that love remains in spite of absence, these well-crafted little wonders further document Cooley's 45 years of books dedicated to the poetic line and its power: "I take that darkness-light, / I hold it with both hands. It's everything, / everything of you I get to keep."
—Jericho Brown

"Peter Cooley's astonishing new book makes visible the spectrum of grief. In the hours and months after his wife's sudden death, ordinary tasks, like selecting a bath towel, splinters grief into many emotional and intellectual states. Agony blazes into desire. Impatience ripples through faith. Sorrow flickers with humor. Cooley's masterful shifts in tone, deft control of imagery and line reconfigure loss in deeply surprising and moving ways. At the root of each craft choice and emotion, though, is his love for his wife. Its brilliance radiants in every syllable in this book."
—Eduardo C. Corral

"The power of elegy, like that of prayer, is to work this transformation: one voice summons another, becoming two. The dead may speak to us in the circumference of a scrubbed pot / or folding laundry. Or in the dawn, the blinding luminous, that fleetingly shap[es] the fractured world into unbrokenness. But amidst these eloquent summonings, the most moving passage in this moving book may be the one that dares itself to think outside the parameters of longing: what becomes of us, asks the poet, when the dead have ceased to wonder how we are? In that question lies the true measure of imagination, and of love."
—Linda Gregerson