Of Marriage

Starred review from May 21, 2018
Cooley (Girl After Girl) brings an impressive range of literary forms, voices, and conceptual lenses to bear on lingering questions about language and intimacy in her accomplished seventh collection. Utilizing tankas, triolets, dictionary definitions, and linguistic portraits, Cooley places vastly different styles and traditions in dialogue with one another. As the collection unfolds, her formal dexterity evokes both limitlessness and constraint, mirroring the speaker’s commitment, but also her ambivalence and her visible trepidation: “I twist/ the wedding beads around my neck. I’ve lost/ my ring, silver and antique.” The line breaks convey a palpable sense of unease as they wind through a form that is described as a “daybook.” The seemingly unnatural pauses created by Cooley’s enjambment suggest the speaker’s hesitation as her modern voice is made to fit the confines of literary tradition in much the same way that a complex and multifarious life is situated within what is here portrayed as the thoroughly unmodern framework of marriage. Cooley thus remains ever vigilant in dangerous terrain, however tamed: “We stand together in the glass garden made of sand and fire.” Throughout, Cooley fearlessly weaves together threads on inadequacy, the inability of the individual to achieve a kind of selfless intimacy, and the shortcomings of the iconic, long-standing institutions so often perceived as emblematic of closeness, self-sacrifice, and commitment.

February 15, 2018

Written as extended metaphors, the poems in this seventh collection from Cooley (Girl After Girl) show facets of her vision of marriage. The best form an engaging story narrating one quality of marriage, as in a poem that portrays a family's visit to a toy museum in Old Salem that ends paradoxically by depicting marriage as "a spell against the missing." Some of the poems seem to be merely a listing of various figures of speech that don't cohere. But in others, such as "Marriage as a Chinese Jump Rope," Cooley makes a poem out of the lack of coherence, as in the last line, "You don't know what I'm talking about, do you?" which comments both on the poem and its technique. VERDICT Ultimately, these poems are reminiscent of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's sonnet "How Do I Love Thee," although Browning's warmth is replaced by a cool and often flippant tone. Yet even though the collection sometimes puts readers at arm's length. Given the subject, it's commendable that Cooley maintains her distance. Her coolness keeps the collection from becoming maudlin.--C. Diane Scharper, Towson Univ., MD

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