By Sarah Haman

Maximalist and sprawling, the atmosphere is not a perfume it is odorless (Free Verse Editions, 2024) by Matthew Cooperman captures feelings of familiar contemporary anxiety on the state of the world. Filled with nostalgia for objects of childhood and poetry from the 60s, Cooperman crafts prose that exudes confidence and love for country and culture. Most impressive are the many lyrical odes containing individual anxious obsessions on growing systemic issues including gun violence, ecological disaster, and other national issues that he consciously contrasts with the Whitman-inspired long-form songs celebrating humanity. 

In the first lengthy poem in the collection, “No Ode,” Cooperman develops a familiar three-section ode that includes an anxious speaker growing in confidence, and the poem ends in a song of the self, perhaps more accurately a song for humankind. In part one, the stanzas are more controlled and conversational, reminiscent of a 1970s Robert Pinsky that slowly unravel into a more lyrically fragmented, nearly surreal imagery a la Dean Young: “Come toward me now, my no generation, the image of less // from space // as we’re moving // away // | // So goes mercury into the fist, so plummet the man from a cliff.” The despair in the lyric moves playfully down the page as the anxiety of the speaker leads to fragmentation then to a lack of language. The first section of the ode ends with the speaker clarifying that “the impulse to deceive is a fear of perfusion, / my soluble membrane, your rage, / what’s missing in a poem.” 

The following section of “No Ode” shifts the tone of the ode, a move the book often makes in its longer poems, by quoting twenty lines (with changes) from Ginsburg’s “Wales Visitation” before moving back to the voice of the speaker. We then hear a reflection on their six-year-old nostalgia for Albion as seen in the television glow of a father’s living room. The poems in the atmosphere is not a perfume it is odorless are most impactful in these moments of detailed momentary reflection that point to familial emotional complexity: “Pop rustles the sheaves of the Chronicle / and calls Buckley a major prick, and smoke curls upward from the ashtray, / and all of moody heaven’s starless black.” The impactful individual moments work best when rooted in relationship. “My Wife’s New Desk” is a particular favorite in the collection. 

The final section of the Ode shifts back to the speaker of part one, and the curious, questioning momentum of the voice synthesizes the emotional cores of the previous parts into a declaration of the poem as a history poem before retracting the statement. Cooperman writes, “In my country there is / no history but the lesson’s we didn’t learn,” before the poem concludes in Whitman fashion: “I am here at the pack and I am here in the court and I am here // in the bed of my country, no has a voice, and a system / on parole, no will not stop in my country.” The momentum of “No Ode” ebbs and flows using the space on the page to contrast and layer anxiety and confidence, recreating a familiar tangled emotional landscape many readers might identify as utterly contemporary. 

The themes of loving people and country unabashedly are ever-present in the vast lyrical project of the book. At times, the shorter controlled poetry reads as well-deserved relief from the intensity of that aforementioned sprawling quality, though the poems that are most impactful are poems that allow the voice space to grow boisterously and with reckless abandon. “Difference Essay” is an ambitious 10-page poem that ruminates over the meaning(s) of difference. The voice explores and follows curiosity, utterly sentient, and we are gifted supplementary material at the bottom of the pages in the form of footnotes that create a path through enjoyable, voice-y meanderings that deftly create and layer carefully crafted images, which themselves allow further rumination on difference. 

As eloquently as the collection balances seemingly contradictory emotional explorations, Cooperman shines a light on the tension of love and despair for a people and a country; one is inextricably linked to both the macro and microscopic threads connecting it all.  In the final lines of the book, Cooperman ends with confident hope, a confidence he allows readers to build alongside him throughout the book: “the markings of progress / by hook and drive // anthem    anodyne    aloud // the little hands / the little hands stitch new flowers . . . ”

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Sarah Haman is a Ph.D student at Ohio University and the Assistant Editor (Poetry) of NOR.