David Cotter

I have always loathed myself, and despite my arrogance and my bluster, I have always been humbled and astounded by the way I have been loved by three women at different stages of my life.  When I was young and broken after the death of my mother, a great woman lifted me and loved me. …

I am cleaning out my closet, going through old boxes, seeing what can be salvaged from all these pre digital scraps. These three poems are from Calgary, 1984. They are three of my first poems.  My mother died of cancer when I was in my final year of high school. I began writing poetry in…

I wrote this poem when I was completing my undergraduate degree in Calgary. Chris Wiseman, who expressed great hopes for me, had it published in Arial. I had forgotten about it until I found it a couple of weeks ago.   I include it here because it focusses on a theme that has been a…

Before I learned that the universe is laughing, my brother died in a fire just a few years after the death of my mother, and I determined the world to be a merciless adversary. I resolved to be fierce and fearless to match this foe, and I tried to put that resolve into this poem.…

I was revisiting Yeats’ A Vision, and I asked Lin to do some automatic writing. She did this in the mornings for about a week, and then talked me through the Chinese, and I wrote down what grabbed me. I carried this around in my back pocket for a week or so, tidying it whenever…

From Chapter 6 of 7, The First Noble Truth. I hated myself so much. I stumbled down from where the lawn slipped over scree to the shore, slipped in under the boathouse, spiralled down to the hangar, stumbled, rolled. I needed to be on my own. I slid on the suit, climbed up in and…

When I was very young, frightened and sleepless, I devised my own method of counting sheep.  I imagined my bed was flying through the clouds I had seen from the window of a plane.  I began to elaborate on this nocturnal vehicle.  The bed became larger, was enclosed in glass, an intelligent capsule with so…

For madmen only. Hesse, Steppenwolf This book begins where book one finishes, with the sale of the school in Beijing.  It takes the form of a diary.  I understand that a diary, especially one drawn from a real life, is off putting, but I felt compelled to complete the story in this way.  Whether or…

I opened an English school in Beijing in 2002.  It grew strong, and I sold it in 2016.  I came to Galway and built a house for my wife and my son. I had designed my life so that I could spend the years remaining to me in study and writing. I wrote a book…

Between extremities man runs his course… Yeats, “Vacillation” I wrote this book as my PhD thesis during the final five years of the 20th century. I sat beside a stack of fat old books in the Lecky Library every day. I could have lived this life forever. When I was finished, I defended my thesis…