Introduction: On Paths Known to No One
by George Elliott Clarke

The melancholy beauty of Cosma’s poetry is
Black sunlight, burgundy intoxication,
A Chinese tranquility:
Happiness never outpaces Sorrow for long….

Tears? She sees them as Tiffany crystal
Melted down to hot-blooded snow.
In her mind, Love sneers at valentines:
It just doesn’t suit pretty words.

Too, museums are only ornate frames,
“Official” ruins, cultural sanitation
(Curators are janitors):
The living Art is raucous at birth.

The honest poet—Cosma—exhibits precision:
The lover sleeps with the beloved,
But yearns for a hot-lipped vampire.
Desire is Despair.

God is opaque, says Cosma. Evil is lucid.
Eden hosts angels—and maggots.
What heart ain’t wholly rotten?
The humane is so unnatural.

Fairy tales are as merciless as sculpture:
That’s the secret of both.
Cosma knows it, and so traces Dickinson,
But a Dickinson seduced by Plath.

So Cosma’s lyrics well up from desert oases—
Distance—in Greece, Argentina, America—
Empires of myth, mirage, and murder.
Cavafy, praying, meets Neruda, singing.

Cosma is as diligent as hunger:
Even though our maps omit Paradise,

Her vision pushes us into light,
But light, as she shows, having the consistency of shadow.

George Elliott Clarke, O.C., O.N.S., Ph.D.
E.J. Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature
University of Toronto
July IX