Peter Cooley, former Poet Laureate of Louisiana, has published twelve books of poetry, the most recent ACCOUNTING FOR THE DARK, poems about living through the pandemic. Cooley is Professor Emeritus of English at Tulane University in New Orleans, where he was Director of Creative Writing 1975-2018. He is Poetry Editor of CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE.

Other poems by Peter Cooley in Verse Daily:
March 28, 2020:   "Advent Poem" "Teach me to read more closely how the sun..."
May 10, 2018:   "Poem for Early Morning, Not an Aubade" "Wonderfully established, the sun across my plate..."
May 13, 2015:   "Nethering" "Heaven is only my next moment here..."
July 28, 2014:   "Washing My Face" "Rising to face him, head-on, man-to-man..."
November 24, 2012:   "Rembrandt, 'Self-Portrait, 1639'" "I heard this from the stars; it must be true..."

Other poems on the web by Peter Cooley:
Twelve poems
Two poems
Seven poems
Sixteen poems
Five poems
Five poems
"Twenty Line Sonnet"
"Third Heaven"
"The Climbers"
Ten poems
"A Café on Magazine Street, New Orleans, September"
"Letters from the Dead"
"Another of the Stages of Grief"

About Accounting for the Dark:

"Peter Cooley makes poems of faith, grounded in intelligent doubt. If his long view is eternity, his poetry marks a daily meditation that does not neglect the songs of neighborhood birds or the murder of George Floyd. His value is inestimable. Cued by Dickinson, Whitman, and Donne, for more than fifty years, he has remained one of a very few living poets who write for the ages."
—Rodney Jones

"'Follow the dark,' enjoins one poem in Peter Cooley's aching new collection. 'Yes, I can do this,' declares another: 'All it takes is absolute surrender.' Reading these poems, I savored not only how they come out of a long apprenticeship of reading and to poetic craft, but also how they come out of a long life of experience, love, and grief—out of a vale of soul-making. I believe Accounting for the Dark is Cooley's most memorable and powerful work to date."
—Jennifer Grotz

"Grieving the death of his wife and the loss of a close friend to suicide, isolated in the midst of a global pandemic, this poet still finds the miraculous in life's dailiness. 'My soul has taken in the clear, cold light / paradise offers when we have lost enough,' he explains. Like a medieval mystic or iconographer plunked down in contemporary New Orleans, Cooley melds the language of angels, incarnation, and resurrection with smartphones, city garbage trucks, and granola bars on sale at Shoppers' Value. The result is a luminous collection that will leave even jaded readers reawakened to the beauty of perishing things and the mysteries of the unseen."
—Julie Kane