Across My Silence

Across My Silence
Jack Cooper
World Audience, Inc
ISBN: 978-1-934209-37-0
Poetry, Anthology
Reviewed by Eugen M. Bacon

My fingers tap on the keyboard, uncertain. What to write? How to write it? How best does one capture a landscape of hope inside darkness, then darkness? Surprise in the core of yearning, more yearning? Beauty inside smog, bigger smog?
The title tells it all, the insight: Across My Silence. I found Jack Cooper in Buckshot (Audience Vol 1, No. 4); a play, not a poem. It was witty and real, co-written with Charles Wesley Bartlett. In that copy of Audience, I did find Jack again in a poem, This Welling Up, now in this compilation. I lingered on each line, felt it like a feather on my neck of longing, drank of its imagery and thirsted for more. I experience the same now, reading Across My Silence, and marvel.
I catch a radiant smile inside a howl, golden fingers of companionship inside unearthly mist. Something inside each poem urges you, begs you to bare your mind, your soul. To risk all and gain all. The heaviness sat on your chest momentarily lifts, and a shimmer of paradise flitters through personal, yawning hell.
Defining moments, Maybe you. Maybe now. Missable, yet present.
Jack Cooper’s art traffics through sickness, murk, a sleepless longing, a shuffling hobo. Here! Here! somewhere in the valley a crow’s solitude, a disabled lark, a “leopard of night circling the crippled day”. It weaves through desolation to find shards of dawn inside shadowed life. Fragment of the Day tells why, how difficult it is “;to remain one person”. Being or unbeing, meaning or bleakness: how to choose, when to choose, which to choose? To look and pass or to be?
This collection will draw you out, make you shamble through long shadows. You will find shells full of dreams in the heart of an elephant graveyard. You will wait wait wait, as long as it takes until you find a smile-filled bowl inside deep seated fear. And then morning will seep into mourning, a fresh garden of Tuesdays will sprout into your 9.00am blue Monday, a jewel of reason will climb into despair, and that pain like “a hungry dog pulling at (your) pants” will collapse. Then and only then, as tabloids scream betrayal not hope, you will experience a deep awakening inside doom. You will paint time and find liberty inside a cold, gray cell.