"Luther and the Devil"
from Robert Cording's
Common Life

Robert Cording:

Robert Cording teaches English and creative writing at College of the Holy Cross where he is the Barrett Professor of Creative Writing. He has published four collections of poems: Life-list, which won the Ohio State University Press/Journal award, in 1987; What Binds Us To This World (Copper Beech Press, 1991); Heavy Grace, (Alice James, 1996); and Against Consolation (CavanKerry Press, 2002) He has received two grants in poetry from the National Endowment of the Arts and two from the Connecticut Commission of the Arts. In 1992, he was poet-in-residence at The Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire. His poems have appeared in the Nation, Image, AGNI, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Poetry, DoubleTake, Orion, Paris Review, The New Yorker and many other magazines. He lives in Woodstock, Connecticut with his wife and three children. (Photo © 2005 John Buckingham)

About Common Life:

“Robert Cording has a profound sense of the fissure that separates self and soul in present day America. He doesn’t point or gloat; rather, in poem after poem he makes us feel the spirit that is lacking and the spirit that is brimming, that spills over the cup of existence each blessed day. To impart such feeling is poetry’s distinctive province and Robert Cording is a crucial poet, one who shows that our unflinching love can withstand our abiding fear."
— Baron Wormser

“Yehuda Amichai once divided poets into two categories: those with kishkas (guts) and those without. The latter type, he said, usually devised some justifying theory for their work, though they seldom touch the human heart. There’s no question which group fits Robert Cording, who is as much amused, baffled, and enchanted by the spiritual world as by the physical one he know so intimately. Among scores of nonpareil poems here, there’s an especially brilliant one called ‘The Weeper.’ And so full of kishkas is Common Life that its author might be dubbed ‘the weep-inducer.’ Here is not only stunning poetry, but also poetry linked to things that matter.”
— Sydney Lea

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