Making Music - Tapa blanda

Sally Cook’s Making Music is a superb collection of poems from one of the most promising writers to emerge from the New Formalist movement in recent years. These selected published pieces touch on multiple aspects of the human experience, and the various ways in which all the arts confront that experience, whether in painting, poetry, music, or even the simple act of gardening. Cook’s voice is subdued and thoughtful, but also strong with the substantiality of a woman skilled in both the language of the visual arts, and the color of language. And in a poetic milieu that becomes more obnoxiously clubbish and obsessed with prizes and networking every year, she has remained independent, free, and unafraid. That in itself is a rarity these days. ~ Joseph S. Salemi, Editor, TRINACRIA

Sally Cook is both painter and poet. Whether writing or painting, she keeps a sharp eye out for the psychological portrait. She has been widely published both as a poet and essayist. Her paintings have been represented, most notably in the Tenth Street Cooperative galleries, the collection of the Burchfield Penney, and the William H. Littlefield Collection at Harvard University. Currently the DAR Museum, Washington, D.C. collection is featuring a large landscape by Cook in a year-long exhibit “By, For, and of the People” Of her poems, she says “These poems are about knowledge and song; that song being expressive of any finely executed artistic expression of joy and beauty; more than just a random tune. If God makes anyone in his image it is the artist, who is a good example of a seemingly unimportant entity forced to endure extreme cold and indifference. Powerless to do more than to endure, the artist waits through the bad times in anticipation of that brief "June" when it will be possible to play and sing once more. Even when cold hovers on the horizon and it becomes difficult to think of singing, the artist always knows there will again be times when he may tune his instrument to the single, steady hum of knowingness, or universal God-given knowledge for the enjoyment of the few who hear.”