Book Review: Night Bus to the Afterlife

Abstract

Bus to the Afterlife. By Peter Cooley. Pittsburgh, Pa.: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2014. 68 pp. $15.95 (paper).Night Bus to the Afterlife is Peter Cooley s ninth book of poetry, all published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. His latest collection is dedicated to, among others, the people of New Orleans. Many of the poems here are explorations of and meditations on the effects of Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall at New Orleans in 2005. It struck with a storm surge that killed almost two thousand people, most of them vulnerable senior citizens. Ninety percent of New Orleans was under flood water, which was twenty feet deep in places. Beyond the statistics that describe Katrina, how are we to understand and respond to natural disasters like these?Cooleys book searches for answers to many of the questions posed by Katrina. He asks the hard questions and occasionally provides tentative answers, as in the opening dialogue of the first poem, See a City in Tears: he said unto me: do you see? / Then I answered: I see only darkness (p. 11). each of the poet's answers Cooley's interrogator repeatedly asks, What else?-demanding that the poet see more, understand more, and describe this understanding, until the poet begins to realize why he has been spared. The poet asks, Why do you persecute me to write this? Whether the strong tensions in this dialogue are between two sides of Cooley's personality or between the divine and the human is left unstated for the reader. Strong poetry such as this asks its readers to wrestle with the difficult questions. And the difficult questions must be articulated again and again, if they are to lead to greater understanding.W. B. Yeats also wrestled repeatedly with spiritual difficulties. Cooley boldly recalls one of Yeats's best-known poems, Sailing to Byzantium, with his own poem by the same name, in which he addresses Yeats directly, asking, What do you think of these words? (p. 24). Yeats, of course, remains as distant, and as near, as his 1928 collection of poems, The Tower. Byzantine echoes and more questions reverberate in Night Morning Sky, the first poem in the second section of the book, and the longest-a poem that, arguably, serves as a centering prayer for the entire collection: To be open to receive the spirit. / Easily said: just writing down the words. / But it may not come as we would have it / in some Byzantine icon of the Christ (p. …