Poetry Book Review: Making Music by Sally Cook

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Reviewed Book: Making Music by Sally Cook, White Violet Press, 2012

by Monika Cooper

Making Music by Sally Cook is a book that comes with a painting on its cover, a still life no less. Wine-colored drapery adorns a blue bowl with a pedestal stem, the bowl mounded with fruit: blackberries and strawberries nestled around oranges, their royal glow vanishing into luminous highlights. The fruit casts its halo onto the deep green background. Shapes are half-realized, there’s no trompe l’oeil polish here but more the feeling of a bas relief, of things partially emerged from the imagination into the shared space of the world. The painting is a luscious thing to look at and it was tricked from the brush of the poet herself.

Sally Cook is painter and poet and she titles this collection of her poems “Making Music.” One of the first things to notice about her work, noticed by many before me, is the synergy of various types of art at play in it, and the related synesthesia of the senses. Painting and poetry, music and gardening, flow around each other and interact in her creative world. You will find nectars and colors in this book, diatonics, modulations, accidentals.

Not only did Cook paint the still life on the cover of Making Music, she includes in the collection a poem “In Praise of Still Life”: a poem that defends a particular genre of art against its powerful and fashionable enemies. Still life loves flowers and fruit, of course, but also vegetables and insects, the whole rich world of natural particulars that begs arrangement by the human hand into something beyond nature. The art departments of the world “Forget the breadth and majesty / Of each tomato, pear, and bee.” Cook’s poems often show the specific instances of beauty she defends in the terrible process of being forgotten, cursed, mocked, heartlessly imitated, or thrown onto the dung heap of contemporary scorn. Hers is an embattled poetry and aesthetic.

In “In Praise of Still Life,” the runners of the show shrug at “buzzing round a bowl of fruit”—a line that deftly captures both their scorn and the total magic of a painting so alive (whether realistic or stylized like the book’s cover picture) that we hear it buzzing, with bees or flies, seen or unseen, with the faint hum that charges stillness when life is present in it. The “cold, ironic, sneering” critics of the pictorial music they can’t appreciate “miss the revolutionary / In a bowl of ripe red cherries.” The “revolutionary” is what the academies look for in art. Why do they miss it in the still life? Is it their failure or is it because it isn’t there? The poem ends on that vibrating ambiguity. The underappreciated bowl of ripe red cherries is a good image for this whole volume of poetry. As you taste your way through it (and you can in its synesthetic universe), you never know what you’re going to get. The cherries of it have a sweet-sour dapple and no two taste alike. Does it include the revolutionary? Or should we even care, so long as we can savor the adazzle-dim of it?

It may or may not be revolutionary but, again, Sally Cook’s poetry is embattled. It’s embattled the way Shakespeare saw beauty embattled, “whose action is no stronger than a flower.” Cook celebrates poetic order against the scatological chaos of the art scene but she also pits it against a rigid, sterile, and soulless kind of order, represented in one poem by “grey clapboards in unbroken rows,” and “awful dragon’s teeth” (“Making All Things Orderly”). The order she carols proceeds in “strict procession, structured joy,” (rhyme and meter, poetically speaking) but is also soft and soulful, “swirled” (“Gardening”). In Cook’s poetry, flowers come to symbolize mocked and massacred but radiant, soulful, and miraculously resilient order. “Making All Things Orderly” is perhaps her most perfect expression of this symbol: sixteen lines, two rhyme-sounds, no repeats. She skip-ropes the whole so beautifully.

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Stare at grey clapboards in unbroken rows
That seem to follow the unceasing sound
Of thrumming traffic, with no vibrant red
Or swaying leaves to soften sunlight’s blows.
Poems of air and chlorophyll’s repose
Have gone; the smallest traces can’t be found;
Destroyed as some fool’s sense of order fed
On massacre of hollyhock and rose.
For you and I know there are always those
Who come to slash and dig and curse the ground
Where fantasy has bloomed and plant instead
Their awful dragon’s teeth.  And I suppose
What grows from them is vigilant and toes
Its dull unthinking line, but pound for pound
Cannot compare to one small flower bed
Of buds, rough stalks, and silken furbelows.

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Flowers embody the order and beauty Cook defends. But there is another layer to “Making Music”: the clinging to a particular beloved and individual note of beauty, in preference and contradistinction to other modes of beauty that may be just as objectively valid. “End of A Season” is a portrait of a mother: making a sharply individual “solstice offering” of “stark stems of thistle,” “a coat of silver paint upon their pods.” In the poem, the beauty of the thistle stalks must contend, not only with glossier, more conventional, kinds of decoration, but with shallow, fashion-dictated copies of itself. It triumphs. In Sally Cook’s poems, it triumphs. “End of A Season” speaks of a poet’s need to bear her witness to her individual vision through to the very end.

Some of the poems in this collection are portraits of women. And some of these women appear against the background of unsympathetic men. There is nothing overtly or conventionally feminist about Cook’s portrayal of the dynamic between the sexes but, through it, she brings the battle that pervades her book to focus in the human realm. In “The Woman Speaks,”, a woman’s love unexpectedly meets with “a freeze so sudden and opaque” from the man in her life that her very being seems to herself “silly,” recalling the kiss of death on the art critics’ lips from “In Praise of Still Life.” “A Second Wife Observes A Blue Moon” shows a woman suffering the cheapening effect of divorce culture: “She’s second, and she’s blue. What can it mean? / A second one of anything is less.” Not a happy ending: but place the poem in the larger context of Sally Cook’s work and you feel in the sad vibes of the lyric something uncannily lovely. (One of the unique notes in Sally Cook’s poetry is its intense awareness of the sheer mystery of blue in the universe.) In such poems as “A Second Wife Observes A Blue Moon,” “The Woman Speaks,” “Presentiment,” and “Time, Passing,” the aging and the feminine are shown as unjust targets of scorn. Advancing age finds it difficult not to despise itself, especially when it meets its own former attitudes to age. The feminine too finds it difficult not to despise itself, especially when it comes into conflict with the masculine and into contact with masculine scorn. But the feminine is worthy, stubbornly worthy, of honor and celebration after all. And so is the elder. Cook’s poetry repeatedly resists an inner and outer contempt for the feminine and the aging, resists the heartless and soulless “world” of the arts. It is Sally Cook contra mundum. And, as some saint has said, it’s not the world outside but the world within that gives us the most trouble.

“Berenice” is another portrait-poem in which, once again, the color blue enchants and mystifies. The woman in the poem is something of an American archetype, “a conscientious mother and a wife,” missing her chance at Europe but making beauty where she is. Her splendid laundry line and nasturtiums comprise a masterpiece of hidden art. This poem, especially, makes music in favor of the dreams, aspirations, and talents of the forgotten American woman, her reaches for beauty and greatness. It sings in favor of hidden art and of hidden art being recognized and appreciated. It champions all our inland, folk-modulated magnificats.

Is that “revolutionary”? I wouldn’t say so. But it sounds a bright clarion for an inner War of Independence, a war that Sally Cook, as a Daughter of the American Revolution and as a poet, wages and wins. Though an anguish in obscurity is palpable throughout the poems in this collection, that anguish is reconciled into an ever more determined will to beauty. “Reward is in the making of the net,” the spider reminds herself, beginning again on another of her “silver parchments” (“Why Spiders Weave”)..

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