Peter Cole
2007 MacArthur Award
Copper Canyon Press offers heartfelt congratulations to Peter Cole for his 2007 MacArthur Fellowship. Cole, who has translated the poems of Taha Muhammad Ali and many others, is honored for "offering a unique vision of the cultural, religious, and linguistic interactions that were and are possible among peoples of the Middle East." We are pleased and proud to acknowledge this esteemed recognition of his work.
So What, the New & Selected Poems of Taha Muhammad Ali, translated by Peter Cole
Clarence Major
Van Gogh's Death
We climbed the steep stairway
to the tiny attic death-room,
more alive for doing so.
Are people talking about power of imagination
when they say
Christ died so we may live?
Tall cypresses still waving in the afternoon.
Everywhere people feel deeply
and look closely and carefully at last things.
On the news the oldest woman said,
he was the ugliest man I ever saw.
And I hear him saying to her, your beauty
like a cypress by the road
more than makes up for what I lack.
And we came down with his life
all around us out there in the fields,
and walked up past the church
to the headstones planted close to the wall.