What Remains: Memory and Erasure in Bess Cooley’s Florence
Reviewed by Dr. Kelsey L. Smoot
Sundress Publications, October 15th, 2024
Paperback, 78 pages, $16
Everything in Bess Cooley’s Florence is borrowed: the narrator’s pulse, thumping reliably thanks to blood donated by strangers; the love for a wife now gone, rejiggered and gifted to Florence (an inanimate gathering of goldenrod). Even the words themselves, through regular erasures, become so sparsely rendered and wholly rearranged that what remains feels like sprouting seedlings of myriad wildflowers.
Florence also offers a multivalent illustration of health—most notably, the way health is not defined in a vacuum but within and alongside the context of other people. Multiple poems in this collection bear witness to a grandfather, whose declining memory seems to run parallel to his granddaughter’s (seemingly the narrator’s) struggles within her own pursuit of health. In For My Mother, Afraid of Forgetting, the narrator’s mother ties a ribbon between wellness and remembrance. Here, the cognitive ability to recognize a loved one becomes the litmus test of a life still worth living. The mother requests: “if this happens to me… lay me down in some snow cocoon, lay me down if I ever forget your face.”
Just as the grandfather names a sprig of goldenrod Florence, there are other moments in this collection where beauty is artfully conjured from the everyday. In MRI Music, the narrator requests classical music during the procedure. The technician forgets to turn it on, but it’s no matter—the narrator begins to “hear tones in the machine’s beeps and clicks” and tries “to follow the rhythm in the way it jolts [her] shoulders.”
While most of the collection is written in free verse, Cooley frequently employs erasure, a fitting form for a book so concerned with memory loss. Often, Cooley pairs a poem with its erasure side by side, creating an arresting visual effect—it’s as though words have been blown away like dandelion seeds, leaving only scattered remains, the ideas and fragments that might be the last to linger if one were slowly losing the original text. At times, she merges erasures, as in Elegy/Family Farm, Maine, which combines two separate poems. I had never seen this technique before, but it marvelously evokes memory’s slipperiness: how things dissipate, but also how they become jumbled, intertwined, indistinguishable—new medleys of recollections forming and replacing the old.
Beyond erasures and the grandfather’s receding memory, Cooley deploys other strategies of disappearance, such as real-time revision. In On the Chicago River, the narrator observes: “to the top of what is no longer the Sears Tower,” lamenting that “the warehouses around it are no longer warehouses, now apartments,” and ruefully, “my brain no longer my brain. I’m no longer a child looking up, thinking I’ll live here, write for the Chicago Tribune, no longer have to imagine my life.” This live undoing of thought enacts disappearance on the page itself, showing how memory and identity can dissolve not only over time but in the very moment of their articulation. The act of revision illuminates how loss is not always gradual and distant, but immediate, creeping in line by line until even momentary thought must contend with dispossession.
What I love most about this collection is Cooley’s ability to create what feels like a cohesive, albeit non-linear, narrative comprised of recurring characters: a daughter, a sister, a mother, a grandfather, even the three strangers vacationing within the narrator’s body—the anonymous hemoglobin donors (playfully dubbed Owen, Gloria, and Oliver)—whose contributions are essential to a body that “drank and drank.” Each character, even the inanimate actors—Florence, the hemoglobin itself, the MRI machine making its music—feels like part of a surrealist family portrait, grasping at tenuous threads of remembrance, and at other times contemplating “letting myself come in and out of the world.”
This collection, while certainly melancholy—at moments deeply elegiac—still manages to hold delightful silver linings. In Florence, the collection’s titular piece, the grandfather reflects on his decision to engage the goldenrod as a living face: “some things,” he tells me, “I make up for a little joy. But there is no denying what is there.” In this moment, both the somber reality of cognitively degenerative illness and the small giddiness of joy’s resilience are held in tandem. In My Mother Asked For Advice About What To Do With Her Father’s Ashes, obvious grief arises in the contemplation of possible futures for the grandfather’s remains: a coral reef in the ocean where a fish might “lay new eggs,” or the crushing succinctness of a single pearl. And yet Cooley manages a tonal lift just before the final two lines, when the narrator’s sister suggests planting a tree, “growing into green, supple branches, little blooming buds,” followed by the tear-jerking close: “oh, I will visit every day until they open.” This last line evokes the bittersweet notion that the grandfather may one day return in bloom, like his treasured goldenrod—Florence. Something blossomed, something worth visiting every day.
