Gerald Snare
On Peter Cooley’s The One Certain Thing
When news of the death of Peter Cooley’s wife had reached me,
his twelfth collection of poems, The One Certain Thing, had already appeared. The volume is surprising, for rather than the usual, often miscellaneous, collection of poems published earlier, this is a coherent and progressive series about one of the signal events of the poet’s life. At first, the reader cannot miss hearing the “lyric cry” in poems meant obviously as laments, where the speaker/lamenter appears without name, but surely in propria persona. There’s little escaping the force of Peter Cooley’s own appearance here. An authentic lyric cry or expostulation cannot be just a simple, recorded ejaculation of grief-stricken emotion. The speaker here has a character throughout, and that character is a poet, and his craft is often the center of his poems. Moreover, the poet is perhaps known by his readers, or at least some of them. The person speaking the elegy appears; the object of elegiac lament appears as well; the mode is direct address. The overall effect of the volume is the sense of presentness and intimacy, but that effect is to me sometimes unsettling, as if one were to stumble onto an encounter not meant to be seen or heard. With this, comes a mild sense of embarrassment. Here, for example, is a passage from “The First Day of Advent” (p.36): Our Advent calendar… you sewed twenty-five years back…. Little pockets number days until Christ’s birth, each holding a hook. I have to stop crying. I’ll loop a star on every one as the days come on. I have to stop crying. That day together we hung this calendar where I will fix it soon
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