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The Power
I’ve noticed more and more of late
My power to infuriate
Is stronger than it’s ever been.
I exercise it even when
I try to be both dull and sweet
And humble, willing, incomplete.
Infuriation fills the air;
I feel it in each icy stare,
The phone that doesn’t ring, the blare
Of constant mediocrity—
The lack of love, the misery.
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Color Songs
Should an arpeggio take flight
It shows you green in minor tones—
A small flute made of malachite
One sprightly saint’s transmuted bones.
How rich the sound that orange makes!
So clear, and unequivocal.
The simple path to Heaven’s gates
Lies in each marigold’s bright ball.
As ochre slants the autumn sun,
Momentum carries you along:
The ancient path that orb’s begun,
The echo of a brassy gong.
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Invisibility
She used to think her sole and starring role
Was set within a sparkling social life
Gadding about from one new watering hole
To others, and so many of them rife
With famous folk, who’d often sink a knife
Into the next’s one’s bright ballooning talk.
She lived an arty and ambitious life
Exceeding pace, and walked the fastest walk,
Until her natal stars began to balk,
And planetary aspects swayed and bent.
Then, though she’d preen herself each time and stalk
All those on greater, higher planes who went
Floating on gilded feet upon the air,
Arrows rushed past her—she was unseen there.
originally published in Expansive Poetry Online
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Sally Cook is both a poet and a painter of magical realism. Her poems have also appeared in Blue Unicorn, First Things, Chronicles, The Formalist Portal, Light Quarterly, National Review, Pennsylvania Review, TRINACRIA, and other electronic and print journals. A six-time nominee for a Pushcart award, in 2007 Cook was featured poet in The Raintown Review. She has received several awards from the World Order of Narrative and Formalist Poets, and her Best American Poetry Challenge-winning poem “As the Underworld Turns” was published in Pool.
It’s no secret that I consider Sally Cook to be one the best poets writing in America today. She has a complete mastery of fictive mimesis, and always produces something interesting, as well as crafted with consummate linguistic skill.
Look at “The Power.” It is a mere eleven short lines, with simple masculine rhymes. And yet it is a profound revelation of deep conflict and emotional suffering, and of a desire for comradeship that is denied, and even shattered.
“Color Songs” shows Cook’s longstanding experience (as both poet and painter) with synaesthesia. For her, sounds have specific colors, and colors have specific sounds. The lines “A small flute made of malachite / One sprightly saint’s transmuted bones” are almost Eliotic in their densely packed suggestion of music, stone, and holiness.
The Shakespearean sonnet “Invisibility” is one of many examples of Cook’s capacity to make perceptive social comments on feminine concerns. Here we are given a description of a woman — her fantasy of living a socially prominent and active life, her participation in that life, her slow disillusion with it, her growing certainty that she was not born for it at all, and her final realization that the world she has idolized and the persons in it have left her behind. This sonnet is a life anatomized and found wanting, and makes the reader shudder at the finality and coldness of what is said.
Notice how even the line spacing in this sonnet serves a purpose. It has the requisite three ABAB CDCD EFEF quatrains with the final closing GG couplet. But Cook breaks the second quatrain at line 6, because line 7 marks the volta. She then breaks the third quatrain at line 10, because a lengthy enjambment ends there, and she can then use line 11 as part of a concluding enjambment that is equally lengthy. Cook long ago learned that Ernest Dowson was correct when he said that every comma and line space in a poem was essential to its architecture.
Sally, there was so much depth of meaning communicated in all three poems which were marvelously constructed and imaginatively presented to us.
Sally, I find these poems to be stunning and exciting both in craft and subject. You truly have a gift for condensing complex emotions and insights into concentrated powerful images.
The language in Color Songs is lush and intriguing — especially for those of us who do not connect sound and color. I especially love the lines beginning with “How rich the sound that orange makes…” and the connection made with marigolds which guide the path to Heaven. I don’t know if it’s intentional or not, but this imagery, for me, evokes the rich Dia de los Muertos tradition in Mexico where strewn marigolds line pathways for the departed.
The Power captured a slice of emotional truth — a somewhat bitter one, alas, but powerfully articulated. I also very much enjoyed “Invisibility” which — though also dealing with disappointed expectations in life, has not only admirable craft but remarkable psychological insight. Life rarely follows the path laid out by our natal stars. As for “invisibility”… it certainly feels that way sometimes. But I don’t believe in it. In fact, the excellence of your poem ironically takes the very idea of invisibility off the table.
I agree with the comments above, Sally. These are all marvelous!
Dearest Sally, in “Power” and “Invisibility” you leave me in awe of the unique and beautiful way you expose the raw and real with exquisite language and images. I can taste the truth in your words of beauty. “Color Songs” is a sensory treat of a linguistic painting of wonder. You never fail to inspire and delight me. Thank you!
The Power interests me, Sally. How much fame and fortune do we seek? And what do we measure mediocrity by? These three poems far exceed mediocrity.
A unique take on the circle of life / the cycle of the seasons in Color Songs, marking the passing year with sound and colours.
In Invisibility, we again have the passing of Time and the narrator measuring themself up against others who seem to have achieved so much more. Alas, I long ago came to terms with not being the next Shakespeare, and even longer ago not measuring up to Joseph Turner. I take comfort in knowing that I’ve made my mark, no matter how modest.
Thanks for three fabulously well-done, thought-provoking reads that I find greatly inspiring in their honesty.
To all commenters above:
Sally Cook is still in rehab, and cannot reply to your observations. But she is deeply grateful for all of them, and wishes well to everyone in the SCP.