Life Death Rebirth in “Mother Water Ash” https://ift.tt/BFSnbRE
The ruin following death and natural disasters is rarely predictable. We can anticipate it, but knowing just how detrimental the damage will be is unknown. Nicole Cooley’s latest collection of poetry, Mother Water Ash, describes the aftermath of grief and environmental catastrophe in our ever-changing world. It asks us to consider what we are left with when the crisis is over.
Mother Water Ash explores, in parallel, life after a mother’s sudden death and after natural disaster in New Orleans. Cooley brilliantly delivers the essence of grief by exploring denial, by longing for things lost, and by reflecting on regret. This collection challenges the reader to recognize the fragility of life, love, and time. Not only does Cooley describe grief itself, but also she objectifies it by holding on to what remains:
“with the last of her DNA gold clamshell I snap shut
now shoved under my couch to avoid also to save
—
from underneath the couch ashtray I won’t empty
should I save the butts her lips once touched…”
It is in these lines of “My Mother’s Ashtray” that Cooley expresses something abstract (grief) in concrete form. While a cigarette butt might be trivial to many, here Cooley has given it power: “with the last of her DNA” haunts the reader with the truth that it is this inanimate object that still holds the mother. We cannot bring back what is gone; rather we must hold onto what is left.
Cooley’s collection is a song of memories and an offering of hope to rebuild from ruin. The poems ricochet between past and present, reminding the reader that grief has many stages, much like the process of restoration after natural disaster. Cooley associates the desolation of emotional loss with the desolation of environmental damage, by telling the tale of the speaker’s loss of her mother in tandem with the natural disaster of Hurricane Katrina.
In “On the Levee Once Again I Walk to Sharpen,” Cooley searches for explanation in a city forgotten and destroyed:
“… to compare how without her still I’ve sworn to be
vapor still furious at the world rushing through
the year’s dark corridor third year without her
street unspooling before me tracking my miles…”
And in “Still Life, River Road,” we see the speaker’s association of a changing world to this loss:
“And a few weeks later a piece in the Chicago Tribune stated, ‘Hurricane Katrina
gave a great American city a rebirth.’
And I came home and told my mother.
… Now there is no one to tell.
My mother is not here.
Now the city goes on without her.”
Cooley’s poems bring comfort and provide a path forward to start again. While the mother is gone and the city has lost many in the hurricane, the message to the reader is we must all keep going. Her brilliant use of imagery conveys the trajectory of grief ultimately defining the cycle of life. This pattern of rebirth at the end of the collection gives promise for moving on and a declaration to be different:
“And a year now past her death and I am ‘better’ – I am not eating her foods,
not pouring ranch dressing on cottage cheese, both of which I hate…”
Mother Water Ash is a phoenix, a collection of poems on rebirth, delivering the valuable truth that eventually those we love and the places we remember will be gone. It is this revelation that makes this collection a wondrous companion to journey with and transform us and our world in the challenging times we encounter.
Mother Water Ash
By Nicole Cooley
LSU Press
Published July 25, 2024
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