Is it ever possible to move fully beyond mourning? Increasingly, the answer is that mourning should never end and the continuing bond with the deceased should be encouraged rather than discouraged in the resolution of grief. This idea of prolonging grief contradicts the popular notion that bereavement involves the survivor severing ties with the lost loved one, freeing themselves to form new attachments, which will enable them to let go of the past. Traditionally, poets have followed a similar trajectory in which the mourner seeks respite through the translation of loss into consolatory gain, compensating for the lost person with their own poetic contents. The work of mourning, as Freud described it, entails a kind of hyper-remembering, a process of obsessive recollection during which the mourner revives the lost other in the space of the psyche, replacing an actual absence with an imaginary presence. With a very specific task to perform, the elegist’s labor of grief seeks to transform grief through remembrance of the dead in a futureless memory.
I can think of no better example of transmuting mourning into an art form than Peter Cooley’s stunning collection of elegies, The One Certain Thing. Cooley describes the most wrenching loss imaginable for him: the death of his beloved wife, Jacki. In the pastoral tradition of elegy, the poet expresses lament, praise for the lost one, and ultimately, consolation in finding a figurative trope that signifies eternity or deathlessness for the beloved — such as a flower or a star — so that loss becomes gain. Cooley’s anguish is palpable in these poems that communicate a sense of his shattering as he “shapes the fractured world into unbrokenness.” Losing a loved one threatens to shatter the mourner’s imaginary psychic integrity, imaginary in this case since his self-image is rooted in his wife, who is not available. This is the widower’s claim because even in the opening poem, Cooley reflects that the boundaries between death and life have become blurred. As he clings to his late wife’s memory, he becomes fully aware that there is an irrecoverable attribute of himself that has died, referring to his sense of having a coherent rather than fractured identity. The structure of the poems reflects that brokenness with hard end stops in an almost Dickinson-like rapidity of thoughts. Cooley demonstrates unusual confidence in the vernacular balanced by often brilliant imagery and grace. Writing about loss reveals within Cooley’s crucible of grief the spirit of his lost wife, who appears paradoxically within the very words that claim she has vanished.
The first poem, “Widower,” sets the stage for five sequences of meditations on his Orpheus-like journey through grief. The poem begins with a question that will be repeated throughout: is the grief his, or is it only hers reflecting on his? Where does he end and she begin or vice versa? It is fitting that the book opens with a question about words, where they come from, and how insufficient they are to tell the story of grief. Yet they are what we have to fill the unfillable void left by the deceased. The poet does not feel like the beneficiary of grief but rather the recipient, once again dissolving the categories of the living and the dead. The poem, in full:
There really is no word for it, is there?
widower, from Widow doesn’t say it.
Nothing as it except poetry
more crying. I’m not a widower,”
I was widowed. And now this imagery,
all I have now, all insufficiency.
This morning when I woke up, you were here,
an indentation in the sheets. You’d left
to start the day in your study, praying.
And, before that, in the middle of the night,
I reached out to touch you or tried to touch —
or was it you reaching out to touch me?
My lines are too interlaced with questioning —
But what else is this hunger not hunger,
thirst not thirst, this aching through my arms,
my legs, how else can I sing with the birds
except to get up before first light again,
to lay my word along, beside, inside
the song that breaks me up, assembles me.
The speaker longs to reach his late wife in her hypothetical world where he imagines she can hear the intimacy in his words when speaking. He confides to the reader that her death was a shock; he was not expecting it and had no way to prepare himself for the trauma on what might have seemed like an ordinary day. And trauma always interferes with processing language, resulting in piecemeal metonymy. Although the work of mourning is most often initially rejected, it requires deep and absorbing focus. The person mourning is like someone who has lost a lover yet remains attached, seeing and feeling a deeply haunted image everywhere.
In the third stanza, Cooley reveals that the poem is his way of speaking to his wife through the lyric and its spontaneous song, a theme that will be iterated throughout these epistle-like poems, many of them reading like letters to her. The last lines are as good as any poetry I’ve read in a long time: “to lay [his]words along, beside, inside/ the song that breaks [him] up, assembles [him].” In the movement from sleep to waking, from the unconscious to the conscious, self-identity is stored somewhere below knowledge, limits, and perhaps language itself. What precedes language is not a sound or a limitless song. The speaker may resist meeting the light of day, and his own identity has been displaced by his wife’s disappearance. That song refers to the questioning that will continue throughout: where does it come from and where does it go, just like the present absence of his wife, the thing that disassembles and reassembles him.
Cooley’s dark but luminous poetry reveals unexpected insights into the tenacity of tested religious faith. In the internal world of the mourner, the boundaries between the self and others are more porous. A person mourned is a composite of figurations, a collage of feelings, thoughts, and sensations tied to the flesh. Instead of manifestly accepting the Christian monodies on death or the promises of transcendence through communion with a redemptive divinity, Cooley’s introspection takes the form of reverence.
In another poem, “To My Wife, Thirty Days After Her Death,” the closing stanza reflects the need to use signification to reach reference. He is beginning to accept her not being in places where she once was:
Shall I begin
The long, terrible (no I’m not ready)
beginnings of acceptance that you’re not here with me
taking in the long, deep, terrible resurrection buds
or the alternative, the long, deep terrible
nights and days, surrounded by your voice
I’m losing now I’m crying, bringing it back
And trying keep you here, putting this down.
This beautiful and painful elegy is characteristic of the collection’s conversational yet artful tone with the poem itself becoming the conduit between the living and the dead. Although most early pastoral elegies follow the path of lament, praise for the dead, and achieved consolation, regarding modern poems, critics like Jahan Ramazani have pointed out that most elegies do not ascribe to achieving consolation. Instead, they render it impossible to give up the attachment and are characterized as melancholic. The melancholic consolidates the connection through an identification with the beloved deceased person. Cooley is painting a portrait of his grief in which he addresses his wife directly in many of the poems and the boundaries between them are all but erased as a result of his internalization of her in representation. Dead people don’t die easily in our imaginations; they continue to live in our internal representations, and nowhere is that more evident than in elegies that turn those representations into signs. Recent theories surrounding grief emphasize the importance of doing just what Cooley does and continuing the bond with the deceased as a life-long attachment. Left alone in his grief, in “First Visitation,” Cooley acknowledges that praying to someone or something not there can be as reverent as praying to a deity; faith is not founded on evidence, but on a lack of evidence, and believing it still to be true:
When we talk to the dead, they answer or not.
They have that choice. But we don’t choose, do we?
… But then there is the other side, the dead
Talking to us through the mire of our unending tasks …
I catch your voice and now you touch me here
Across my right hand, this second, the next.
And as I write this, you’re already gone.
One might think that the poem would end here, but the poet is always transcending the limits of death by the very act of elegizing. Hence he concludes with a statement to his wife which also reveals her constant presence so typical of mourning:
You refuse to leave. I would never ask you to.
In this poem, the speaker experiences an auditory hallucination in which he hears the voice of the dead. She is of that perfect world. Yet memory does not negate her human imperfections but instead exalts in them:
Next the living room couch, plush gray suede
never the same again as I found you,
your tongue hanging at the right side of your mouth.
Love, I touched your forehead. Cold. I knew then.
Steeped in a book project that examines consolatory and anti-consolatory elegies, I expected to find Cooley resistant to consolation. “Reading Habits” expresses religious overtones in which his wife is intercessory between heaven and earth, and though divided, through this poem he finds solace in a wistful moment in which the two are fused as one:
Next day, today, I woke up early
I wasn’t sick, that volcano in my soul
quiet and still. So today only trembling a little.
I went about dusting, your hand over mine
Vacuuming — your grip …
We continued our yesterday, our now,
treading, hours by minutes, our afterlife.
In “Spirit Ground, A Romance,” the deceased is again internalized to the point that they are of one mind and person. If she is spirit, she can penetrate the flesh. As he writes:
I knew you as I know myself, daily,
as I love and hate myself, the twitches
down my shoulder mornings, my rib spasms,
the scab on my left knee, or was it yours?
… I think you’re writing this poem with me, aren’t you?
Slip your fingers over mine. Steady my hand.
Yet, he is not only compelled by the identification he makes within himself, but he also sees that the world as it is now for him coexists with his memory of her — as if she has left it there for him to find as he writes about his world: “I take the darkness-light / I hold it with both hands. It’s everything / everything of you I get to keep.”
The final poem, “One Certain Thing,” shows the possibility of finding a space for his grief — and that salvation is in the poem, the vessel that contains his wife’s soul. He imagines her reading the words he is writing, a presence that provides comfort and solace. In the tradition of the classical elegies of Milton and Spenser, the elegist leaves the dead only when they are made immortal in the poem itself:
These are the words from immortality,
no one stands between us now except Death.
I enter it entirely writing this.
I have to tell you I am not alone.,
watching you read. Eternity’s with me.
We like to watch you read. Read us again.
This stanza is nothing less than astonishing as the poet imagines his reader (and his wife) reading the words as he writes, invoked by some divine inspiration and feeling her both inside the words and watching him write the words. As long as the life that he has given her in the elegies can be read, she lives, yes, but more importantly, the two of them will be read again; hence their end is now the beginning. To work through profound, irrecoverable loss is a human triumph; it is a human triumph to write about it too.
[Published by Carnegie Mellon University Press on February 27, 2021, 80 pages, $15.95]