Reviews & Interviews
Review:
Radiance , 2007
Review by Linnea Johnson in Prairie Schooner
The three-plus pages of single-spaced acknowledgments attest to the fact that Barbara Crooker is one of the best poets you’ve been able to read only every now and then. Writing her entire adult life and now a grandmother, this is her very first full-length collection of poems; a fact to give all poets pause, even as one splashes into the lightstream of finally being able to read this perfect book.
Like the Impressionists Crooker daubs into the lyrics and onto the palette of her poems
...these iris rise
writhe, charmed like snakes by the song of the sun.
The wild blue heart of longing moves up, up,
from papery rhizomes...
["Iris, 1889"]
she has proceeded without standard imprimatur and brouhaha. Like the Impressionists, too, Crooker has succeeded. With a minim here, a tittle there, an iota virtually everywhere, she’s been nominated for seventeen Pushcart Prizes; she is the author of ten chapbooks and more than four hundred fifty published poems; she has had ten residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; Stanley Kunitz judged the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred competition which she won; and for her terrific, wit-whipped poem, "Nearing Menopause, I Run Into Elvis at Shoprite," and read by Alfre Woodard on the 1997 audio collection, "Grow Old Along With Me--The Best is Yet to Be," she was nominated for a Grammy.
RADIANCE, divided into six parts, opens with "All That Is Glorious Around Us" and closes with Poem Ending with a Line by Rumi," establishing a frame of the "grand vistas, sublime peaks, mist-filled overlooks, and towering clouds" of the luminous paintings referenced by the poem's title and the Thomas Worthington Whittredge oil painting, "Kaaterskill Falls," reproduced on this book's cover. Immediately, Crooker tells us that "everything is glorious around us" ncluding "doing errands on a day of driving rain." Full of journeying water, red and gold leaves, rocky escarpment, panoramic landscape, the "glories of breath" and how her mother struggles to breathe, this poem causes us to notice "small rainbows of oil on the pavement" in juxtaposition with the oil paintings of The Hudson River School of art.
"There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground" is Rumi's line of poetry with which Crooker closes the book. Everything here, too, is "glorious around us." The line before Rumi's, one of Crooker's, leaves us in the hushed and tawny silence of a late autumn, "...so deep, the only sound, leaf falling on leaf."
In this volume of 84 pages/50 poems Crooker re-constitutes Aix-en-Provence, Paris, Shoprite, and a grammar lesson; she pegs wash onto a line, calls hawks from the sky, blazes iris, peonies, and sunflowers to life, gives us the Shozui temple, lilacs, licks of desire, red and blue, the gyre, Deconstructionism, a comet and an opossum.
In "The Comet and the Opossum" Crooker, out at night, momentarily balances on transience, like a tightrope walker teetering on a highwire timeline, seeing light from a 20,000 years ago comet even as she notices the familiar backyard opossum diminish to bones alone, bones which might still be where she is now 20,ooo years hence.
Last night, looking up at the inky blackness, I felt myself
shrink, smaller than the smallest bones in the opossum’s tail,
and then I found the comet one last time...
When into words she forms her son's autism, her friend's cancer, or any of the other galvanic, tearing, breaking things of life, she isn't confessional or asking for pity, she's creating "the made thing." In a 2005 interview, she says, "I don't look at writing as a form of self-expression, but rather, the love of the made thing, like a hand-thrown bowl or oil on canvas. I try to do what William Stafford said, 'I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.'"
This is all there is: the red cherries, the green leaves,
sky like a pale silk dress, and the rise and fall
of the sweet breeze. Sometimes, just what you have
manages to be enough.
["Happiness"]
This poet explores, as do few others, generating love again and again within an old love, a long-nurtured love.
Two stubborn people, dulled into habit
stuck in the old sock of marriage, might just fall in love again
["Possibly"]
...often, I slip a hand under
your body to anchor myself to this
earth....
["Away in Virginia..."]
"Tangled up in love, running out of time," Crooker writes:
...Our children almost grown,
our parents gone, it happened so fast. Each day we must learn
again how to love, between morning’s quick coffee
and evening’s slow return...
["In the Middle"]
Indeed, in "Irrational Numbers" it's as if the mathematics of the couple is solved and resolved by neither want nor longing nor desire, but, instead, because they are elemental as color and day, and geometry, "...the angle/ of intersection, where we come together..."
In RADIANCE we learn, too, what Crooker was doing the day Jerry Garcia died, how corn grows, the nature of happiness and crows, the landscapes of motherhood, growing food, and the infinite. Whether her subject is politics or maternal grief, Crooker is neither troubled nor neurotic. The cyclical, non-idealized world is her home and she belongs to it, it to her. She knows how this mysterious as-is world works through her work, some of which is finally in one place together, and which we are finally privy to, thanks to RADIANCE.
They speak in tongues; whole glossolalia rolls
out of their beaks. Their song is unmusical, industrial,
like a wrench on metal. They rise in a dark river,
fly past the redbuds next to the cherries, a small stream
of violets underneath...
["Quiscalus, Quiscula"]
In this poem, too, she tells us to "Love whatever you can," and that "night is always bearing down." She is a wizard of unsentimental passion!
And, Crooker brandishes a lucid sense of humor--rooted and witty--along with her other knowing, going senses. In "Twenty-five Years of Rejection Slips" Crooker plumbs the familiar writers' abyss of sending out work to editors hoping to get one’s poems Out There and into the Grand Conversation of literary publication chatter, but, instead, usually facing "the great steamroller of indifference," mailboxes empty of acceptance letters; the learning to be content with "...the hot buzz of the cicadas' applause."
...Look at the stanzas
of light in the locust leaves as they bob and weave
in the hot July wind, their effortless green repetition
and refrain. Why not give it up now?
What, she asks rhetorically, does it matter if she reads her work only to the "cardinals and wrens!"
But, she is writing this poem, after all, because most days are her poem's "tomorrow" when "...a clean sheet comes up/in the roller, and we'll start all over again."
Onto that clean sheet in the typewriter's roller, Crooker presses the materials of her art, such as using the sonnet form and the line break in fresh ways.
For instance, the first eight lines of Crooker's blank verse, iambic pentameter sonnet, "Some October," asks someone (and not God), if the speaker of the poem has done enough "to deserve this life," if she's "made a difference," then turns to "today," "the wind pour[ing] out of Canada," the equation of joy unbalancing sorrow, even at the end of the green seasons, in October. We, too, are drawn into Crooker’s copper woods and into the blue sky to see the "...twilight, when the clouds stream from the west/ like the breath of God..." When and because the meter is broken in the "little song's" envoi, we ask ourselves the questions she asks her Someone to ask her again during that "some twilight," and we wonder then what else besides the meter is broken.
In "Star of Wonder, Star of Light," it’s a particular choice of line break which unhinges us. Coming out of "the accident" in the first line of the poem, that accident unexplained before or after the mention, her line break in the second line leaves "My husband and children [are] hanging."
In the third line we see that they are hanging...lights on a Christmas tree. But she has jangled our nerves with, first, that unexplained "accident" and then, with that minor chord 'hanging family' all swaddled in what could otherwise seem to be a typical happy family scene. After all, she begins the poem, "It’s Christmas..." --so informal and signaling happiness that one could insert a perky "hey," but no:
Shadows gather behind the hills. The tree turns dark green,
then black...
Or maybe yes. Here’s how the poem concludes:
husband, son, and daughter in a circle around the tree,
their arms full of stars.
Crooker is both student and author of movement and gesture, creating the spontaneity and pith of real life. Her dimensional impressions tether life as much as is possible, sometimes foreshortening time in order to paint a whirling candid music sans mythology. With the best of them, she captures fleeting inner voices of light and color. One might say of Crooker as Andre Mellerio said of Cezanne, "One might say that Cezanne wishes to restore intact to each object...its true and essential radiance."
For pure bravura sparkle-and-spangle sumptuousness infused with the pulse and fire of everyone’s love of all things chlorophyllic, from Hildegarde von Bingen's "green finger of God" to Dylan Thomas' "green fuse," Crooker praises "what comes from the dirt" in "Vegetable Love," her litany of color, taste, sound, scent, palpable sensation of roundness, pull and sink of roots, the "cool jade ruffles" of lettuces, and that "dark blood of the earth," beets...
and basil, sweet basil, nuzzled
by fumbling bees drunk on the sun.
Crooker accomplishes what poetry can accomplish--creating the dimensional from the flat, light from black type on white paper, real life from the raw; juggling the hit-or-miss music of life.
In "evening’s violet cashmere" in "In Aix-en-Provence"
. . .where breakfast is a flaky
roll that shatters when I bite it, that sings like the sun
in my mouth. Where lunch is a ripe pear...
she says that:
... on the last day of my life, I'd like
to be working, like Cezanne, even if it means being pulled home
in a laundry cart and dying of pneumonia. I want to be out there,
singing...
Of the dozen or so writers I need to read, Barbara Crooker is foremost among them. Each element of a radiant, achieving life is present in this bright, working book, these poems which illuminate all at once life's layered and complex realities. Glorious. Radiant. RADIANCE is a book which poets and non-poets will be buying for, and reading to, each other for years to come. Thinking of Alicia Ostriker, I tell you that one can read RADIANCE by the light of the poems themselves.
Review:
Radiance , 2007
~by Katharyn Howd Machan in Louisiana Literature
“To Deserve This Life”:
A Review of RADIANCE by Barbara Crooker
(winner of the Word Press First Book Prize, 2005)
I am reading Barbara Crooker’s poetry while sitting in a garden where she taught, in Key West, Florida: Nancy Forrester’s Secret Garden. Early March sunlight from a high blue sky falls and catches here and there, wands of palm suffused to emerald, curving orchids veined with stars. The dappled paths of shredded cedar gleam warm gold, hot silver. Her book is titled RADIANCE, and it is all about light—and shadows, too, of course, the dark from which all life is born, survival, long love’s roots.
The way a garden requires art, the way a marriage requires art, that turn of hand and resilience of heart that shapes and nurtures sustained growth: RADIANCE gives us a way of looking at the world with fuller appreciation for what we can make and what we can live even as loss and hardship threaten, take hold, take away.
To enter into a full collection of a poet’s work—RADIANCE offers fifty poems—is to move with the poet into years of his or her life. Themes emerge, and motifs of imagery, root to stem to leaf. The “I” in Barbara Crooker’s poems is very close to the woman, sixty in 2005, who has lived in love with a good husband and raised a son who developed autism in toddlerhood, a woman who appreciates tangible life and the art that arises to express it. Celebrating the natural world—especially in Pennsylvania and in Provence—and the intricacy of humans’ physical and spiritual survival, her poems find light greater than shadow. “…everything glorious is around/us already” asserts the book’s first poem, looking to ordinary life (a phrase that titles one of Crooker’s earlier short collections) for what matters, a day that can culminate in “the landscape of our bodies under the quilt,” as she describes her marriage bed in another poem. Even though she must ask about her son, “What does he see in his world, where geometry/is more beautiful than a human face?” (“Autism Poem: The Grid”), again and again in RADIANCE she rises to a life-affirming perspective: sighting a comet and realizing how the human race continues, turning the color blue into “twilight longings, a handful of crushed lilacs,” watching geese as “they stitch up the sky, and it is whole again,” perceiving dandelions as “a handful of golden change.”
Deftly seeding the book are allusions to artists who have painted the everyday natural world—Manet, Monet, Van Gogh, Renoir, Cezanne—and it is clear their work has richly informed Crooker’s questions and choices about how a writer can communicate depth of experience and create compelling beauty despite the human condition of suffering. “When the world/was reduced to a black flag/of pain, what else could he do/but paint flowers…?” she asks about Manet, and thinks of Monet “at eighty, painting waterlilies, pond, and sky…” and of Van Gogh in 1889 painting iris that through his brush “rise, writhe, charmed like snakes by the song of the sun.” Indeed, Crooker’s affinity to Van Gogh reveals itself in “Sunflowers” when, after quoting from a letter to his brother, she echoes, “I am in it, too, this life, with its longing/and sorrows,” affirming her need and commitment to continue as a poet.
“Praise what comes from the dirt” concludes “Vegetable Love,” which voluptuously lists and elaborates on the visceral sensations of what we grow and cook and eat, a theme central to Crooker’s writing. The hunger of the body, the fulfillment and gratitude in satisfying that hunger, the joy of renewed appetite: in other poems we hear of “a ripe pear, slab/of melting cheese, baton of bread, all crust” and of onions “electric, wired, a green dance/of new growth” and of corn’s “call of tender kernels in checkerboard lines; our hunger/is enormous, our fingers itch to start” and even of the imagined lips of Elvis as “soft moon pies.” Always a new image emerges in describing and delighting in this elemental need made profound.
Ultimately, perhaps it is the vision that Barbara Crooker shares with Rumi that gives RADIANCE such resonating strength: clear poems that do not deny sorrow but absorb it into survival and celebration, the greatest act of love of others and self. Her life is no quiet temple where Basho might compose a haiku, but a whirl of needs and tasks as “the kettle boils over,” every day calling her name out loud even as she holds onto the silent inner space needed to write. Rumi’s words end the final poem of the book: “There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.” RADIANCE is one of them—light in the black soil of the garden—a deep, deep joy to read.
Review:
Radiance , 2007
~Priscilla Atkins in The Midwest Quarterly
For many years now, whenever I see Barbara Crooker’s name listed in a literary magazine’s table of contents, I smile with quiet anticipation: I know I am going to read a good poem. I opened Crooker’s first full-length collection Radiance with avid anticipation—what a treat, to have so many of Crooker’s honest, clear narratives culled and published together. I was not disappointed.
In Radiance, many of the themes of earlier works are here in rich array: the final months of an aging relative, the body’s gradual, relentless letting go; the transcendent experience of observing nature, especially birds—geese, crows, grackles; the plain guises in which love manifests itself among family members, particularly spouses. Perhaps one of the more distinguishing features of this collection is the references to the art and words of various 19th century painters, either French or associated with France—Renoir, Monet, Cezanne, Manet, Van Gogh—throughout many of the poems.
Several poems in each of Radiance’s six sections reference either a particular artist, or a specific work of art, as a means to clarify or intensify the speaker’s observations of her own life and relationships. The interweaving of the art references is seamless, organic—mention of a particular artwork, or a particular artist’s style, lifts the image-making and emotional power of a poem to a higher plane without breaking the world of the poem, without feeling the least bit clunky or taped on. Here are the first lines from a poem early in the first section:
This day could be reduced
to three elements:
green grass, blue hills,
yellow fields of mustard,
solid in its planes
as any late Cezanne.
It makes me think
of the curves your hips
and back make
when you are sleeping.
Because this reader is familiar with the painters and the paintings to which Crooker alludes, it is difficult to judge whether a reader of a different background would have a vastly different reading. But I think there is enough for any reader to go on. In many instances, it is a specific quotation from an artist’s letter or other written source that is the vehicle for advancing a poem’s ponderings: Crooker quotes Monet in one poem, “These landscapes of water/ and reflections have become an obsession for me”; Van Gogh in another, “There is no blue without yellow.”
One of Crooker’s many gifts is for being grounded, honest, and straightforward, while at the same time offering the reader fresh imagery and insight. In one instance she likens winter-hard spring soil to “a calculus textbook”; in another, a grackle’s yellow eyes are evoked by “the clasp of a satin purse.” In a poem celebrating a season of growth and renewal, the poet does not whitewash the particulars of the late twentieth century American landscape: “Even in industrial parks/ trees are covered with white blossoms,/ festive as brides.”
Crooker’s deft ability to supply examples, catalogs of “things,” enriches and elucidates the reader’s journey. In one of several of the poems that describe a mother’s attempt to understand the world as experienced through the mind of her autistic child, the poet observes:
He loves things
that are perforated:
toilet paper, graham
crackers, coupons
in magazines, loves
the order of the tiny
holes, the way
the boundaries
are defined.
And real life
is messy and vague.
He shrinks back . . . .
There are no easy answers here—-one does not get the sense that the speaker ever comes to terms with a perspective so radically different from her own (“What does he see in his world, where geometry/ is more beautiful than a human face?”)—yet art, which includes poetry—Crooker quotes Mary Oliver in the book’s opening piece, Rumi in the closing one—and the minds of artists who create such indelible maps of their visions, provide a lens through which the speaker can see things, including the mind of an autistic child (“I think of Van Gogh, . . . / Think how hard the simplest action must be/ when those voices won’t leave you alone”), differently.
Radiance is a book of tribute to the miraculous evidenced in everyday life, to nature, and human nature. To the ability of art and nature to transport us, not to another world, but rather more deeply into this one, where we live with our feet on the ground, helping our elders move towards death, our children towards life, where “all we do is pass through here, the best way we can,” where love for a long-time spouse can be aroused by underwear “soft from a thousand washings.”
