Cooley, Nicole Mother Water Ash: Poems, Louisiana State University Press 2024.

72 pp. $19.95

 How does one identify the shape of grief?

Is it possible, then, if the shape is determined that the shape can be held?

While these questions may have no answer, it is with great definitiveness that grief is a shape-shifter; it can fit in small places and, in the same vein, spill into large spaces, too. These places and spaces are both undefinable and all-compassing and so when writers explore grief’s terrain, perhaps it is best to tread lightly, as to not get lost in a labyrinth of love and loss. Exploring the cityscape of New Orleans and landscapes of motherhood and daughterhood, the poems in Mother Water Ash gain their power throughout the collection to illustrate that “grief has its own topography” (from opening poem “On the Mississippi…”). It is through this illustration that Nicole Cooley reveals her grief-map, and the poems within become the way toward healing and understanding in the aftermath of great loss.

An early favorite poem from the book is titled “Missing”; it is formatted like a series of stairs and lures the reader into an ever-flowing meditation on grief. In particular, I was drawn to the minimal punctuation used to illustrate this meditation. Consider this movement in the middle of the poem:

        fall afternoon air rinsed cold

trees ringed with dead leaves

and I wear her coat

        Grief is a river or it’s an animal

sharp-toothed and urgent

When my first daughter was a baby

my mother said–of all I strived to do

that my girl would not remember–

She would remember the absence of it– 

The recurring ri- and co- sounds of the first stanza pull readers into the scene and the rhyme of trees and leaves keeps us there—it’s a subtle nuance Cooley uses to anchor and engage the moment. These poetic moves lead to a powerful phrase from the narrator’s mother: She would remember the absence of it. Before the poem turns to a close, Grief shows its shape-shifting ways through multiple phrases before the last one:

…Grief is a metronome clicking on my mother’s piano…

…Grief is the fact that my hands belong to her...

The last one:

       …Grief is the fact that her hair

which never grayed

resembles mine

The absence of it.

It’s a captivating poetic move, showing grief and its multiple avenues, each one riffing off a line in the hands stanza, “close[er] to the skin.” The return to the absence line is striking and calculated, and hammers home the close to this poem.

It should be noted that “Missing” is a recurring title and houses four more poems of the same name—thus making five poems in the collection named “Missing.” Other repetitions also sprout up throughout the collection; one instance in which Cooley does this is through “Monochords,” which appears three times in the collection and is directly influenced by the late Greek poet Yiannis Ritsos. Mother Water Ash is peppered with such influences and definitions as the narrator continues to move through the ever-present grief.

Speaking of “Monochords,” the first iteration of this poem houses nearly twenty moments that build upon each other for a truly moving piece. For example:

3.

Grief: a crape myrtle tree branch snags against my wrist, and I am ten and

I swallow a chip of my mother’s black soap, a present from my father, from her

nightgown drawer.

4.

Once breath pressed out of her body.

5.

I hate all the people who still have mothers.

Grief doesn’t hold punches so it’s fitting that Cooley’s poems do the same—righteous in their expression of anger and frustration—and they are stronger for it. The expression is wholly, pulsingly human, and I found myself audibly gasping at the poetic maneuver. Similarly, I felt out of breath at these next four monochords:

9.

Care: a burdened state of mind, as that arising from heavy responsibilities; worry.

10.

How my mother took care How my mother took care of my daughters. How my mother—

11.

How we did not know she was dying.

12.

Care: charge, custody, keeping supervision; trust in watching, guarding, overseeing.

Whew! Truly a magical moment that echoes the questioning and the grieving that gets at the heart of the poem. One such echo was the repetition of how—which made me think of the panging of the syllable ow—showcases the question that grief often leaves in its wake. It’s also a testament to Cooley’s wielding of language that two of these monochords are definition-based, which anchors the poem.

The last poem I would like to discuss is “Being the Oldest Daughter,” which is almost seven poems in one—a poetic grief collage—and it remains one of the most evocative poems in the collection because of all the different twists and turns it takes readers on. Let’s begin:

My mother’s death is another body: she flaunts herself, takes up too much

space in my bed, ruins my closet, wears my best black skirt,

side-zipped up her thigh. Spins and twirls in my slip,

color of a baby aspirin, color of a dulled sun.

What an incredibly strong opening that is filled with the all-present grief—truly dizzying in its execution. In particular, I’m drawn to the verb choice: flaunts, ruins, takes. These words are cutting and unnerving as death itself. The dizzying doesn’t stop:

As if now my mother refuses

to be a mother, has no interest in the children

who cry for her, demand sippy cups of milk, want

to settle in her arms in a favorite green chair.

She won’t touch them, refuses every embrace.

The demarcations of safety—“in the children,” “sippy cups of milk,” “favorite green chair”—are subverted because death is an ultimate subversion; it leaves those who are grieving arrested in its wake. One of the separate sections of the poems that’s stayed with me takes its title from the piece itself—“Being the Oldest Daughter.”

who gets the texts on her phone: Peace, love, and strength to you!

Thinking of you! Stay strong!

Who is offered gifts of scented bath crystals, body wash.

Important to stay clean and lovely.

Let me know what you need, people say.

Maybe I need nothing.

Another questioning of safety and comfort because grief challenges those very notions. I was reminded of a book I read earlier this year, A Truce That Is Not Peace by Miriam Toews (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025), in which she writes of a friend who lost a child to cancer. Her words:

My friend told me she’d never felt more alone and sealed off in her coffin of grief

than when people told her, even lovingly, even with tender hugs, that they

couldn’t imagine her sadness.

Try! Stay with me!

In both cases a failure of language leads to frustration and exhaustion. Often in the face of grieving is the compelling need to fix, to make clean or right; I love that Cooley and Toews remind us this isn’t needed (or even welcomed)! Truly a refreshing approach. 

Time and time again, Nicole Cooley’s poems are an anchor in the sea of grief; the kind of grief that lays bare the unrelenting force of losing a loved one—through both place and human connection—and the poems that result are rooted in details and definitions that anchor us with her and her collection.