Greg Cook

Photo: Rob Roy Productions

Gregory M. Cook was born in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. As one of three poets in his immediate family, he has made writers and their survival a personal and a professional study. His biography of his close friend of twenty years, One Heart, One Way/ Alden Nowlan: a writer’s life, was undertaken following a two-year appointment as writer-in-residence at the University of Waterloo. More recently he has lived in Toronto, Fredericton, and Saint John, New Brunswick, where he is writing a biography of his friend, novelist Ernest Buckler (1908-1984).

Cook has read from his works in schools and universities in all Canadian provinces, and the Yukon where he was in residence at Berton House Writers' Retreat – as well as in Maine and Georgia, USA; England; the Netherlands; and Germany. He is a member of Writers’ Union of Canada, The League of Canadian Poets and the Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick, and an honourary member of the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia.

Selected List of Publications:

Editor, Alden Nowlan: Essays on His Works. Guernica Editions, 2006. ISBN 1-55071-254-3 / 978-1-55071-254-4.
For more information on this book, click here.

"This book examines Nowlan's bravery in accepting the limitations of his class and his art, as well as the myopia of the critical milieu in which his work is measured."
-- Guernica Editions.

Songs of the Wounded: new and selected poems. Black Moss Press, 2004.
ISBN 0-88753-389-2.

“As he will tell you, in a way all poems become love poems, and art, like
love, is an act of faith. If that is the case, this book transcends the ordinary
and takes us into the extraordinary experience of being alive.”
-- Black Moss Press

"Always, a poignant, elegiac tone haunts these lyrics, whether Cook speaks of love, or nature, or family. Any risk of sentimentality is cut by his usage of hard particulars."--George Elliot Clarke, (Halifax) Sunday Herald, November 2004.

"The images and the emotions play before your eyes as they have come painted from a master's brush." -- Daphne Dykeman, New Brunswick Reader, February 2005.

One Heart, One Way. Alden Nowlan: A Writer's Life. Pottersfield Press, 2003. ISBN 1-895900-59-X.
Finalist for the 2004 Atlantic Independent Booksellers’ Choice Award and 2004 The Dartmouth Book Award (Non- Fiction).
For more information on this book, click here.

"Cook can claim to have written the definitive biography... [he] has compiled an authoritative life."
-- Shane Nielson, The Fiddlehead, Autumn 2005.

“Essential reading for anyone interested in Canadian literature.”
-- Jeanette Lynes, Sunday Herald, January, 2004.

“A profound and truly innovative study, full of grace and passion.”
-- George Fetherling, Vancouver Sun, January, 2004.

“Mr. Cook has written a compelling biography of a great man who he knew and loved.
-- David Adams Richards, book jacket.

“Greg Cook has given us a book full of detail, full of letters, poems and stories,
and free of judgment. We can make up our own minds.”
-- Robert Bly, Preface, One Heart, One Way.

Untying the Tongue. Black Moss Press, 2002. ISBN 0-88753-368-X.

“In Cook's self-conscious world, everything is story, including the process of writing."
-- Carole A. Turner, Canadian Literature.

“Like Alden Nowlan, Cook can write poems in which the immediate detail
cracks open to reveal a transcendence which in turn quickens the
immediate.”
-- Julia Reibetanz, University of Toronto Quarterly

My Diary of Earth. Pottersfield Press, 1987. ISBN 0-919001-44-0.

“A powerful talisman with which he makes himself a shaman of our
enlightenment.... energetic and urgent; he achieves his effects through
striving for the right words almost in spite of the right words.”
-- Fiddlehead

Love in Flight. Ragweed Press, 1985. ISBN 0-920304-42-7.

“Delivers constantly ... a muted, open eyed respect for both the living as
they carry on and the dead as they lived.”
-- Canadian Materials for Schools and Libraries

Love En Route. Goose Lane/Fiddlehead. ISBN 0-86492-034-2.

“A fine sense of movement of landscape and family history that allows us
to transcend pain and vulgarity.”
-- Canadian Literature

Love from Backfields. Breakwater, 1980. ISBN 0-919948-89-8.

“A fine craftsman, a consummate poet.”
-- The Dalhousie Review

Recent Anthologies

Letting Go: An Anthology of Loss and Survival. Black Moss Press, 2005. ISBN 0-88753-393-0.
For more information on this book, click here.

Landmarks: An Anthology of New Atlantic Poetry, Acorn Press, 2001. ISBN 0-9698606-9-2. For more information on this book, click here.

Click HERE for Greg Cook's personal website.

You can send mail to Greg Cook
c/o Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia