A Review of Gratitude Diary by Jessica Cohn
Gratitude Diary
by Jessica Cohn
Main Street Rag, 2024.
Grief as a murmuration. Gratitude as a swooping summons to life despite loss. These are the underlying themes in Jessica’s Cohn’s breathtaking debut collection of poems, Gratitude Diary. Whether marking environmental demise, “In Iceland, the people dedicate a plaque to Ok, the first glacier gone. And what of us? What can be done?”
Or the oddity of a grand piano discovered on a Northern California shore, “A coverless, legless baby grand...whatever distance is measured here, the answer is yes,” we are given the essential gift of a narrative that is perpetually and unexpectedly, buoyant.
Cohn begins her diary by transporting us to her midwestern origins on the shores of Lake Superior with the poem "Here In":
There are not enough verbs for the griefs.
Mother is sad. Her past,
a vast cup of broken islands. Sometimes,
you leave home for harder arrangements.
You strike the anvil.
You become the anvil.
You become the rift.
...If we could peer with new eyes
into the society of atoms,
we could see into our bonds,
steeped in instability,
yet how they bind us. By
adhesion, cohesion, we
traveled up the capillaries
of ginkgoes, raised wooden
branches of the conifers in
hosanna.
Some of my favorites include the titular "Body" where Cohn states, “There are so many ways we do not listen to one another.” Also, "The Fair Condition of the World," where she offers “I have failed in so many ways. Greed. Lust. Envy. Gluttony. Wrath. Overwatering...All the Things I thought I needed, dirtied, chipped, degraded, burned, stained.”
And "Secret Baptism":
At a child’s birth, you get a long look at
nakedness. You can grasp how very tender
we are. But my God, his birth. The terror
of it...
...Unable to
pick a religion,
we blessed him ourselves.
I know. But you’ve wanted to have something
both ways, surely.
Without doubt, we want life without loss. But the phenomenal world doesn’t operate in declarations or silos. We are indebted to Cohn for her confessions and questions. For her willingness to shed and rebuild from the inside out.
Saturated with avian life, Gratitude Diary treats us to the songs and movements of simple sparrows, robins, warblers, cormorants, and gulls, as well as sooty shearwaters, raptors, falcons, and night herons, among others. These creatures flit from page to page elevating us beyond the insistence of daily loss and loneliness, to the ineffable leaps often only undertaken with wings.
With each read of this complex text in ten chapters, I am further convinced that Gratitude Diary is a study in clever, spirited paradox. It is a meteoric exploration undertaken during casual strolls on sandy shores.
I want to spend time with Cohn. She is a convivial host, offering readers the delicacy of her lines and her astute vision as a woman, mother, philosopher, and dreamer. I leave you with this excerpt from "How to Read the Summer Sky":
...The Perseids, in retreat as summers end. A meteor is just
a piece of sand in motion. It has no answers.
But we can wish. Oh, how we wish.
