In Deep
Author photo by Krista Cook  
Like Frost, Jeanne Weston Cook has been one "acquainted with the night." But despite the sorrows darkening her first book of poems, Stunned by Illumination, she has seen miracles of light pouring through stained glass high over the dark nave of life. In the end, her book is a Song of Joy. Familial love is a saving grace in these luminous poems, and also courage, the courage of a nurse called upon to face and conquer death, even if only by her enormous generosity of spirit. Refusing to be dimmed by the Puritan grays that are her heritage, the poet has allowed music to rise up in her. About Stunned by Illumination, Nancy Eimers has written,“These poems are so honest and unadorned, their vision possessed of a bareness I find remarkable. I mean something like clarity, both of image and emotion, to which this poet is ever true. I am reminded of Elizabeth Bishop when she writes of Nova Scotia or Brazil, but Jeanne Cook trains her exacting eye on the ‘Puritan grays,’ the forests ‘too dark to see into,’ the contradictory codes and instructions that are part of her own loved and troubling New England inheritance. This is a book—and a poet—I deeply trust and admire.” And this from April Ossman: “Claiming her birthright as a poet to reveal truth through art, the speaker of these deft, vivid lyric poems sheds generations of Puritanical family silence and shame like sunlight illuminating stained glass, like a north ‘wind…sing[ing] across stone-cropped fields, / through chinks in the walls,’ finding the admirable in the most beleaguered souls, in family, and in nursing patients whose suffering she witnesses with a calm both hair-raising and compassionate, embracing New England heritage and landscape in their tenacity and harsh, transcendent beauty.”

Cover painting: "Reflection"
by Phyllis Gosling Greenway

Stunned by Illumination is Jeanne Weston Cook’s first collection of poetry. Her previous book, Voices from the Flood (2012), recounts in essays and photographs the experiences of survivors, volunteers, and emergency personnel in Central Vermont after flooding from Tropical Storm Irene. Following her retirement from a long career in nursing, Cook co-founded and chaired the Paine Mountain Arts Council in Vermont. Always active in music, she attended the Raphael Trio Chamber Music Workshop for many summers, and accompanied numerous choruses and professional lieder recitals in the Central Vermont area. She is currently on the board of the Northfield Historical Society and editor of its newsletter, The Dog River Crier. Although she has lived and travelled extensively abroad and escapes Vermont winters in South Carolina, Cook’s long ancestral ties to New England are deep. Ironically, it was only later in life, while working with California poet Ralph Angel en route to her MFA at Vermont College of Fine Arts, that she found a way to begin expressing her New England voice. That way came through a study of Emily Dickinson, a poet with whom she feels much at home. Cook and her husband live in Northfield, Vermont. Their older daughter and her husband live in Boston; their second daughter and her family, including two cherished grandchildren, live in Ireland. Family reunions at Great Pond in Maine are yearly highlights.

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BOOK STATISTICS

ISBN 978-1-936482-54-2

Copyright © 2013 by Jeanne Weston Cook

6" x 9" paperback, 72 pages

 

SAMPLE POEMS

Copyright ©2013 by Jeanne Weston Cook

 

DANDELION

They leap wild and uncontained
across New England lawns, and when
I try to cut one out, it re-erupts
threefold, defiant.

I dig the dandelions up, boil the leaves
with salted pork and vinegar.
Bittersweet and pungent,
this stew reminds me of my mother,
who gathered the weed from the farmhouse lawn
to serve for supper.

Near the end of spring the stalk gets soft,
the resplendent head goes gray—
a puff-ball that the slightest breeze
sends floating. Seeds lodge

all summer and winter long, unseen.
One early morning, come next May,
a thousand suns will light my lawn—
banishing for just a week or two
those Puritan grays.

COMPASS ROSE

for my daughters

A mapmaker walks a rocky coastline,
traces the bays and inlets,
the outcrops and saliences.
But she finds, after each step,
that the shoreline isn’t as it was.

She draws lines on the map
to trace her true path, but as she breaks
them down into finer and finer fractals
the lines straighten and dissolve
into infinity. So she draws a compass rose
to bloom in a distant corner of her map
to set the true meridians,
to orient herself.

On my map, there are two such emblems.
My beautiful compass roses bloom
at the center of my life, mark
my relation to the world, remind me
of my place. They bring me back to true.

 

ELUSIVE SONG

for Hazel, Medfield State Hospital, 1961

She was nineteen, carried from the music conservatory
to that gothic ward, where she spiraled down

into utter silence. I was nineteen
when they sent me there, a student taught to care

but terrified of those I came to tend. I brokered time
by playing songs on a broken-down piano

in the dayrooms of the haunted.
It started as a hum, then rose,

full-throated, just behind me—
a voice not heard for thirty years.

I dream of Jeannie with the light brown hair
erupted from that soul so long considered dead.

Music, they say, lives only in the moment.
It’s memory that repeats sound in the dark, coiled recesses.

The two of us made music while I stayed.
I heard no song ever surfaced again

before she died, though fifty years later
I think of her still: the sinking, the rising up of music.

 

CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL, BOSTON, 1963

The world funnels down to this ethereal cave
that floats above the city streets. No one
ever sleeps here, kept awake by alarms and beeps,
soft voices, peculiar light that pales the nurses,
makes blue babies even bluer.

I stand all night by the isolette, helping her
to breathe, reminding myself to breathe.
I count the blood drops in, the blood flow out,
I empty her tubes, I watch the monitor
for signs. The night bears in.

I count the minutes she’s alive,
try not to think about the mother
at the Boston Lying-In across the street,
who’s never held her child.
Just before dawn,

the monitor’s peaks flatten—
her life, less than one day long,
has been spent with me.

I remove the lines
and wrap her in a soft white shroud,
carry the two pounds of her
through hospital corridors, down
elevators, and through the heavy door.
Then from her first and only embrace
I release her finally
into the cool metal crib.

THE WATER STRIDER

Between the tiny insect on the surface
and the oval shadow-feet gliding along
the sandy bottom, is space like the air
between Jackson Pollack’s paintbrush
and his canvas, like the silence
in the nave of the cathedral
after the Lachrymosa ends.
Something in that space
swirls and rumbles in the brain.
But when a cloud covers the sun
the shadow-feet disappear.
There’s just a water strider,
walking on the pond.

SAINTE-CHAPELLE, PARIS

At eye level, the quatrefoils are easy to find
without looking up. Visions of gruesome torture
and deaths of martyrs confirm my renunciation
of religion and the violence done in its name.

A little higher, the Gothic capitals—
leaves of oak and buttercup, branches of hop,
holly and fig. They lead my gaze still higher,
and then—

that light! Nothing
has prepared me for the fiery, jeweled
stained glass walls rising hundreds of feet,
pulling my eyes upward to a world

where Adam, Eve, Elijah, Mary,
the wise men, a carpenter gleam
in riotous color. So expert at holding back,
doubting, living in shadow,

I am stunned by this illumination
of the book my heart, however fragile,
still loves. I cannot look down.

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