murky and still in a cradle of watery poison

Pamphlet published by Sad Press, 2015. 

There are not many alternative-poetry pamphlets that I could genuinely say I wish were longer, but this is one. Cooke's twelve poems seem to be over in a rush, not so much because of a paucity of text as because of the reader's greed for these euphoric/catastrophic narratives.  

Basically, they are accounts of dreams that have an apocalyptic premise. Apparently based on notes of true dreams by the author, but rendered in different forms.  

New apocalypse dream: there is an apocalypse. I am at work. The only way to avoid the apocalypse is to apply for study leave ....

how shit would it be if the end of the world

was a rave in the snow. yet here it is. muddy

snowy footfalls & loud music & stoned eyes

with drugs generated from beetroot compounds...

That's how two of the pieces begin.

Here are some of the euphoric lines:

Rain here does not clean; it muddies; we feel this as

justice.

We are bloodless; shit fish.

And it is just water coming down on people.

That there are only minutes left. Our knowledge is

incommensurable. We are happy.

a waterfall of effluence tumbling

people with everything else how

far can it fall off the edge of this

city...

...can it be fun to surf before you die

in sewage washed to the end the...

In the seas a block of salmon fillets floats high as an iceberg, rearing above our deck, enormous and pinkly soft at the edges -- you could cut off your dinner, but it's diseased.

 

*

I would also have liked to quote the bit where they're hiding in a squat in Brighton trying to recharge their phones -- the apocalypse has become an irritation.  ... but anyway this is as much of an idea as I can give you in one post.

Dreams are a release of fiction into the aridities of art.

Dreams (genuine ones) are overdetermined. Cooke (a big Freud fan)  has allowed the overdetermination to flow into her poems. So the book is somehow a fond autobiography of childhood and adolescence and even university common rooms at the same time that it is an alarming dredge into the sub-political globalized mentality of 2015, and a captious view of social behaviour when we're not dreaming.

The hilarity in the book comes from reason confronting the irrational. Sometimes reason is demolished by it, and sometimes reason wins small petulant victories.  In the end Apocalypse Dreams aligns itself with that shrinking part of the population that is still educated and intelligent. It is enlightened.

The apocalypse is inevitable defeat. We are all in a slow apocalypse and must one day face that defeat: the time when it seems better to let go than to struggle, the time when we know, in office parlance, that we are "fighting a losing battle". Cooke's poems witness both the relief and the dread of that release.

But it's not just or even mainly about individual demise. Even before 2015, and acceleratingly since, much of our world has perceptibly begun to behave more like rats in a hot cage. Apocalypse Dreams feels like a useful guide to our times.