Poetry Collections
Translations
Many of my poems were picked by Najwan Darwish and translated into Arabic by Anas Tarif for inclusion in The New Arab (Al-Araby Al-Jadeed / العربي الجديد). I was featured in the newspaper in September, 2024. A full collection of my translated works can be found here.
Cooper Young is an American poet whose work draws on Eastern poetic traditions, especially the Japanese haiku tradition, which he re-presents in a modern and humanist poem that is different from the prevailing American poetry currently being written. His poems have a captivating simplicity that reveals the depth of the human relationships they reveal. He completed his collection “Sacred Grounds” after a two-month journey/pilgrimage to Japan, during which he followed in the footsteps of the seventeenth-century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho. The Japanese/Eastern influences and environment were transformed into something new and different through the poet’s voice, thus continuing a tradition that is rarely represented today in American or European poetry; a tradition that drew inspiration from Eastern poetry, as Ezra Pound did with ancient Chinese poetry, and T. Eliot to some extent with Indian (Sanskrit) or Persian poetry (the influence of Omar Khayyam on his beginnings), and even the French poet Louis Aragon’s inspiration from ancient Arabic poetry (his “Elsa’s Madman” is the best example), and before them all Goethe’s inspiration from Hafez Shirazi in “The Oriental Divan of the Western Author” published in the second decade of the eighteenth century.
Najwan Darwish (Translated from Arabic by Google Translate)
Sacred Grounds
My first chapbook of poetry, Sacred Grounds, was published in 2020 by Finishing Line Press and can be purchased through: Finishing Line Press // Amazon
Praise for Sacred Grounds
Retracing the journeys of Bashō, Cooper Young finds the route the same and not the same. The old rivers and shrines alternate with neon and convenience stores, and a monk might be riding a bus in “a knee brace, aviators.” But like his Japanese master, Young dares simplicity. To read these poems is to enter a walled garden, shutting the door and muting the noise behind us. They are full of poised and quiet moments where the sparest landscapes and the slightest gestures shine. These poems are on a paradoxical journey to stillness. They travel light, they leave us lighter and clearer.
James Richardson