Photo Credit: Rob Roy Productions
Website:
http://personal.nbnet.nb.ca/cookgreg/
Email:
c/o Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia
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.
- Editor, Alden Nowlan: Essays on His Works. Guernica Editions, 2006. ISBN 1-55071-254-3 / 978-1-55071-254-4.
- Click here for more information.
- "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).
- "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
- "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
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- 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
- Letting Go: An Anthology of Loss and Survival. Black Moss Press, 2005. ISBN 0-88753-393-0.
- Landmarks: An Anthology of New Atlantic Poetry. Acorn Press, 2001. ISBN 0-9698606-9-2.
