Reviews & Interviews

Review:

More , 2010
reviewed by David Matthew Barnes in Main Street Rag,

“Always, this hunger for more.” Barbara Crooker ends the opening poem of her delicious collection More with this declaration of insatiability. It’s very telling and appropriate, given that hunger – both physical and spiritual – is the central theme that simmers in the heart and soul of each poem.
Crooker’s poetry is electric. She ignites her readers’ senses with her seemingly unquenchable lust for more, more, more. “You want a bad boy for a lover,/one who’d make a lousy husband,/a wanderer on a Harley,” she writes in the lustful “What You Want”, capturing the eternal crave for something better, faster, sexier.
Crooker injects sensual images of food into many of the poems, attempting to stir up the desire in her readers – and it works. “Velvet on the tongue. The light/of late afternoons. I am eating/sunshine, spread on bread,” she writes in “Ode to Olive Oil”. Similarly, in “Excuses, Excuses” she writes, “The sweetness/of the creamy cake slides off my fork/like eating a cloud. The engine/of our new marriage hums and purrs.”
One her many strengths as a poet is her seamless ability to control the emotional tone in each poem. Crooker knows just when to strike at the heart strings, how to mastermind the melancholy, the wanderlust, the regrets by never allowing them to take over the poem, but rather revealing them in subtle – but very strategic – flashes. “All of us, broken, some way/or other. All of us dazzling in the brilliant slanting light,” she writes in “Strewn”, acknowledging the hope that burns through the final lines of many of the poems.
Crooker’s work is accessible – call it “reader friendly”. While she demonstrates a mastery of technique – evident in her command of form – it is the confident, often playful, energetic voice in each of her poems that wraps around the yearning soul of her readers as if to say, “I’m hungry for more, too. Just like you.” And, in the end, it’s true. This collection will leave you wanting more, more, more of Crooker’s work. “I will enter your body like a jolt of caffeine,” she promises in one of the finest poems in this collection “Frida Kahlo Speaks”. And, without a doubt, Crooker has made good on her word.

Review:

Line Dance , 2009
reviewed by Julie L. Moore in Christianity & Literature

In a 2004 interview with New Works Review, Barbara Crooker confesses to writing poems “piecemeal” without having in mind an eventual book’s thematic development or organizational structure. Yet, Line Dance, her latest book from Word Press, which also published her first collection Radiance, is so tightly—and beautifully—woven together, one would never guess that’s the case.

An apt description for the collection lies in her poem, “The Lowest Common Denominator,” where Crooker notes that all literature addresses “ love or loss / when you get right down / to the heart” . And indeed, Crooker explores those themes as she writes about her marriage of thirty plus years; her children, including her autistic son; the deaths of family and friends; and her own aging. Motifs of music and dance, math and maps, even language and poetry itself, interlock the collection’s poems like the arms in the wedding dance described in the opening, title poem.

In “Line Dance,” Crooker introduces the reader to the particular themes of celebration and gratitude as she likewise unites lyricism to narration. Here is the story of her own relationships against the backdrop of her daughter’s wedding. Here are the metaphors of music—in this poem, to the tune of “New York, New York”—and dance. And here is the poet’s contagious joy, “circling around the bride / in her frothy gown, bubbles rising / in a fluted glass, spilling out, running over.”

Section I follows, revealing to whom Crooker refers in “Line Dance” when she notes that “everyone [she’s] ever loved / is here today, even the dead . . . ” In these first few poems, Crooker contemplates the deaths of her father, a close friend, and the child of close friends. In addition, this section reveals that Crooker’s entire collection acts like an art gallery, as her poems, placed side by side, enhance and illuminate each other’s images. For instance, following “Breath,” a poem about the death of Crooker’s father, is “Blues for Karen,” a poem that continues her meditations about loss. It also plays off the “white and blue” sky in the last line of “Breath” as “Blues” begins, “The season of your death, morning glories trailed / along the wire fence, one tone deeper than the sky.” Likewise, as that poem ends with the observation that “this old blue world will keep on spinning, / without you,” the next poem, “The Geography of Grief,” opens, “For you have entered another country . . .” And while the “map of this country defies cartography” because, in part, “loss / has shaped the topography, each contour line,” in the next poem, &The Map of the World, 1630,’ by Henricus Hondius,” Crooker shows us that “the new world does not exist, lies somewhere / beyond the borders of vegetation, globed fruits . . .” How fitting then that the poem to follow is called “The Knot Garden” and describes her son’s autism as a disease “where the possibilities diminish as the years / branch on” and where “[they’ll] arrive at the alpine / altitudes where the vegetation’s scarce, the flowers / tiny but exquisite, the foliage barely visible.” Crooker does more than merely execute effective enjambment of individual lines; she enjambs poem to poem, rhyming images in section after braided section.

In fact, section II begins with the poem “Line” which extends the music metaphor of the title poem since it’s what’s “played over and over, / improvised, embroidered, embellished.” The metaphor also transforms into a trope about poetry itself; indeed, we love with Crooker, “the way [the line] moves away and then comes back, / finds itself again . . . ” And the lines do move, zigzags with purpose, slides that yes, are sometimes electric. Like when Crooker observes in “Climbing the Eiffel Tower at Night,”

One minute the lights wink out, the next,
they’re back again, the clouds whipping
around our heads like a dancer’s gauzy veil.
We kiss, wrapped in scarves of mist,
the lights go out again.

At the top of this thin edifice, a single needle,
like the sweet momentary joining of flesh.

Section III opens with two poems about Crooker’s childhood dance lessons, poems that expand the dance motif and echo section II’s “Les Faux Amis,” in which she laments editors’ rejection slips, as she quotes her dance teacher’s words to her: “Your timing’s off, you don’t / measure up, you dance to a different drum.” Such feelings of displacement, even inferiority, link Crooker to her son, her kindred spirit literally and figuratively, in “45s, LPs” where we’re told he is “out of synch with everyone else.” They also link her to her adult self in “How Many Trees Died for This Poem?” when she thinks about a friend’s perspective on poetry—that “publishing a poem / is like dropping rose petals in the Grand Canyon.” She subsequently wonders about her own sense of belonging and purpose: “Does the world want another / poem?”

Section IV begins with “One Song,” which reminds us of the book’s epigraph, a quotation of Rumi exhorting the readers to “Dance in your blood”; continues to follow the lyric impulse of much of Crooker’s verse; and harkens back to “Breath.” Here cardinals, chickadees, and sparrows fly to music while “[a]ll the world breathes in, breathes out.” Furthermore, in “Eggplants,” the “purple stars” experience the “lovely dance” of bloom, “bobbing / on spiky stems,” and in “My Middle Daughter, on the Edge of Adolescence, Learns to Play the Saxophone,” Crooker reflects, “Soon, she’ll be a woman. / She’s gonna learn to play the blues.” Even gravy sings in Crooker’s pot, and we watch—and hear—“the bubble / and seethe as it plays the score.” Particularly notable in this section is “Rhythm Section,” where Crooker describes how her son’s self-made music includes “small bells / on a stick that he’s shaking,” evoking the music of mountains and Hopkins’s dear bluebells and the “clear gold notes / in church, when a circle of wheat / becomes the body of God, given / for all of us, even for him.” This is not poetry that’s merely cerebral, though its metaphysical leanings certainly give us that. This is poetry that’s transcendent, even urgent.

Furthermore, Crooker rewards the reader with clarity and complexity. As Pulitzer-prize winning poet Claudia Emerson notes, “[C]larity does not preclude depth. If our language is precise, our imagery clear, our metaphors original and well crafted, then we can indeed create poems that will reward a listener on being heard for the first time and also repay the astute, close reader.” The aesthetic principle Emerson argues for seems to coincide with Crooker’s own assertions in an interview with Mike Geffner that poetry is, at its core, communication with a reader. Crooker also says in that same interview that a poem, like a piece of visual art, needs contrast—light and shadow—to develop depth.

Crooker develops such depth not only by exploring themes like gratitude and blessing, even joy, alongside themes of sorrow and suffering but also by juxtaposing otherwise dissimilar images. For example, in “Valentine,” snow is both “the mute language of loss” as well as the busy composer of “its small white music, the little notes tumbling / off the staff.” Language likewise has a complex role with her son. Crooker expresses her struggles to communicate with him in several poems, even noting how language sometimes proves virtually useless. And yet, despite her frustrations with language, displayed, for example, in the poem “Simile,” it is also to language she turns—and to the very literary technique her son is trying to learn—to express her love for him: “My pea-shaped / heart, red as a stop sign, swells, fills with / the helium of tenderness, thinks it might burst.” This is wit, a conceit turned on its ear, but not wit for wit’s sake. This is our complex relationship to language. As beautiful as it can be, it can also be misunderstood and ineffective. But it can also lead to transcendence of pain, to the expression of love.

This truth leads to the triumph in her poems exploring the language of marital love. For instance, Crooker writes in “Impermanent Joy,” that she and her husband speak “different dialects” where “only the calligraphy / of words is the same, so far apart are nuance / and meaning, shadows and shade.” Yet, the same poem opens with her confession that she is “full of such a long desire for [her husband] / and all that is lovely between a woman and a man.” In addition, Crooker’s poetry reveals the redemptive quality of long-married love a la Sharon Olds, whom Crooker says is one of her favorite poets. In “When the Acacia Blooms,” for instance, Crooker remembers a day shared with her husband in France, using the contrasts of day and night as well as the glorious combination of what else? French cuisine and love making with her husband:

. . . What I remember is the sun,
how it licked our arms and faces like a rough—

tongued cat, how everything was aureate
that spring afternoon, like walking into a painting;

how we shared a sandwich, jambon et fromage,
your hand covered mine, and I thought

of the night before, our small room, how we
climbed the ladder of each other’s body

until the stars showered us with sparks,
and then we fell . . .

Finally, Crooker’s poems about creation remind us not only of the radiance in her first book but also of how she defines “radiant” as meaning “God, or God’s love.” Indeed, in Crooker’s “Gratitude,” the trees don’t wait to “clap their green hands” until the age to come but already join “the whole / world” that “sings, gleams as if it were basted in butter.” Truly, Crooker does “[feel the earth, / . . . feel the pulse / of the planet” and helps us feel it, too (“Sunflowers” ). Sometimes, Crooker is even Oliveresque, as in the luminous “Listen,” where she writes, “I can’t tell you what prayer is, but I can take / the breath of the meadow into my mouth, / and I can release it for the leaves’ green need.”

These poems demonstrate how Crooker perseveres through the pain she’s experienced in her life: she sees too much in the world to praise. As a result, Crooker’s poetry, like the grandson she describes in “Lemons,” is “rinsed with light from another / world.”

Review:

Line Dance , 2009
reviewed by Phebe Davidson in Cider Press Review

Line Dance, Barbara Crooker’s second full book of poems, carries its readers into the lyrically rendered universe of the poet’s world and life. Crooker sets her tone and her metaphoric stance with the title poem that opens the book. This tour de force has the wavy left margin of a dance—which could be anything from the Alley Cat to the venerable Conga Line– giving poetic form to both the energy of the dance and the joyous host of dancers at a wedding reception:

and there, at the end, is my ex-husband,
the one who didn’t want to be married any
More, holding his soon-to-be-estranged second
wife, the one he left us for, at arm’s length. Start

spreading the news: everyone I’ve ever loved
is here today, even the dead, raising a glass
and dancing, circling around the bride
in her frothy gown, bubbles rising
in a fluted glass, spilling out, running over.
(“Line Dance”)

The conjoined metaphors of line and dance create a series of meditations that range from small everyday detail to the vast cyclical movement of love and sorrow, welcome and loss that punctuate even the easiest of life. There are poems that offer show us a cardinal who “stabs / the hedgerow with his piercing notes” (“One Song”) and “tiny lettuces just coming up, / so perfect they could make you cry: Green Towers, / Red Sails, Oak Leaf” (“Gratitude”). With the poet, we observe her visiting mother, whose “skin is thin / as a folded road map” (“Hummingbird”). With her we hear the old records her autistic son plays over and over again and wonder “When we’re gone, what then? / What slot will he fit into like a quarter / slipping in a jukebox for three plays, / songs you could dance to all night long?” (“45s, LPs”). Crooker’s exceptional sense of telling detail illuminates this book with the sense of life as it is lived and felt, full of small pleasures, not free of pain, yet full as well of light.

Crooker is extremely deft with her craft. Her sensibility, for all its love of detail, embodies an almost austere recognition of the seriousness that underscores the small, necessary moments she loves, Line Dance never settles into (or for) an easy nostalgia or gossamer lyric effect. When Crooker remembers Janis Joplin, for instance, it is not just “pedal to the floor, / hundred miles an hour” or “skinny hips, shimmy and shine”—it is also “one loud moan of pain / through the gravel and broken glass in your throat” (“Janis”). The memory of sunlight that “licked our arms and faces like a rough- / tongued cat” (“When the Acacia Blooms”) becomes something more, an obligation perhaps, or a responsibility to love what is given, so that writing of sunflowers, she tells us “I nod, heavy-headed, / and heft my burden of light” Wisely, she brings the book full circle, from the wedding’s dance of joy to the nourishment of gravy, the music of its “bubble and seethe,” the way it “makes / delicious everything it covers” (“Gravy”) .