What Happened at Dinner, and After

n these finely-wrought poems of longing and laughter, love and loss, the heart regards its seasons. Employing a reporter's keen eye and ear, Cooper enlivens his narratives of person and place with layers of telling detail-a beloved's final days spent struggling to remain close, a neighbor's wry musings on life and livestock, childhood memories that confuse, comfort or enlighten-rendering them each extraordinary yet strangely familiar. In an affectionate ode to his river town, a mist "silently sets its palm on the Delaware at dawn." In the final poem, a woman in an adjacent car at a traffic light reminds for a moment of a person once dear. "Then red became green and ... she left me the gift of watching her drive away." For these and other lingering images, I keep returning to the pleasures of this wise collection.