Reviews & Interviews
Review:
Radiance , 2007
~by Rachel Dacus in Midwest Quarterly
"Deep," the title of a poem in Barbara Crooker's new poetry collection, might well have served as the book’s title for the way it describes the mature depth of these poems, meditations on a life deeply felt, intensely observed and often recorded with painterly detail and color. The poet provides a stunning image for this depth of seeing in the poem "Deep":
So far into this marriage
like a John Deere harvester
in a field of corn
a small green island
planted right
in the middle of everything.
That image stayed with me for days. The book’s other poems did not disappoint my expectation that this is poetry planted right in the middle of life. The language and images here are straightforward as the far end of a long conversation, reserving difficulty for life itself. Informed by a solid century of distinguished American women in verse, Crooker builds on the poetry of foremothers like Elizabeth Bishop and Louise Bogan, poets for whom the gate of the personal swung wide into large vistas. Like Bogan, Crooker's themes revolve around love and loss, but unlike Bogan, the radiance evoked by the book's title suffuses the whole. A sheen of sense rapture warms even difficult subjects such as an autistic child's perceptual system ("The Grid") or a meditation on mortality ("Some October").
The poems often reminded me of other contemporary women poets who use sensual imagery and simple language to explore deep human truths. Poets like Mary Oliver and Jane Hirshfield come to mind in such lines as these from the poem "In the Middle":
Time is always ahead of us,
running down to the beach,
urging us on faster, faster,
but sometimes we take off our watches,
sometimes we lie in the hammock,
caught between the mesh
of rope and the net of stars,
suspended, tangled up
in love, running out of time.
Barbara Crooker strikes me as a miniaturist of the quotidian. Her poetry locates the natural radiance within the ordinary, distills from the mundanely tragic a vivid essence. She declares this goal in the book's first poem, "All That Is Glorious Around Us," which, interestingly, incorporates some lines from Mary Oliver. Here is the ending:
But everything glorious
is around us already:
black and blue graffiti
shining in the rain's
bright glaze,
the small rainbows of oil
on the pavement,where
the last car to park
has left its mark
on the glistening
street, this radiant world.
The intense beauty of homely images-–"small rainbows of oil"-–reminds me of Bishop's famous poem "The Fish" for its insistence on found beauty as surpassing all other glory.
Many poems are about paintings and their painters. The poet knows every art work must have its balance of light and dark, and her choice in the painting poems has largely been to remain representational or impressionistic, in keeping with the style of the Impressionists whose paintings she considers. She addresses the weight of meaning in her life, assigning it color and style:
and here I am, mid-span,
a full-figured woman
who could have posed for Renoir.
When I die, I want you to plant
peonies for me, so each May
my body will resurrect itself
in these opulent blooms,
one of les Baigneuses,
sunlight stippling
their luminous breasts.
She weaves in the writing of painters as well as images of their work, as in "Sunflowers," a hot spiral of a poem evoking Van Gogh:
He said in a letter to his brother,
I am in it with all
my heart, and I am in it too,
this life, with its longing
and sorrows.
Barbara Crooker's collection will reward a wide variety of readers. Its variations between blue notes and sunflower songs is an extended poetic cry from the middle and depth of life-–a full-throated affirmation not often enough heard in a poetry landscape of increasingly non-representational figures.
Though she has a painterly approach in many of the poems, the deepest resonance for me was one of a heartfelt honesty and straightforwardness-–the true spirit of confessional poetry, and a quality in any writing that compels by its universal ability to speak to the human condition. In a series of memoir poems set in the 1950s, Crooker eloquently rebuts the current anti-confessional trend in poems like “The Fifties” and “Junior High, Home Economics,” which provide a long, sweet setup for her hilarious rant on this literary prejudice. In “Against Nostalgia” Crooker lampoons a quotation from an unnamed magazine’s editorial guidelines: “We’re not interested in poems about somebody’s dead grandmother.” The poem’s response:
. . . We hate the yellow glow
of nostalgia that seeps
out of the windows
in the house where you grew up;
we detest chintz prints,
the antimacassars. And we don’t
want to hear your scratchy 45s,
those golden oldies,
or page through your yearbook,
row after row of girls
with bubble cuts and Peter Pan
collars. We want to be exalted,
uplifted; we want to soar
like red-tailed hawks
on warm thermals,
rise above the blood, the dirt,
the earth.
Crooker’s poems do soar, but they never lose touch with the ground they spring from. They luxuriate in the earth’s riches. In a line from the book’s gorgeous last poem, “Poem Ending with a Line by Rumi,” Crooker states her poetic position clearly: “Standing upright, it’s hard to see clearly from this height; / we have to get on our hands and knees to find/ scarlet pimpernel in the lawn, blue-eyed grass/ or a mourning cloak, the row of cobalt dots hidden/ in the black stripes on its tawny wings.” Again from the same poem, here’s a line that sums up Crooker’s work in this collection: “so deep, the only sound, leaf falling on leaf. / There are a hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”
Review:
Radiance , 2007
WORDS MADE FLESH : POETRY AND THE EUCHARISTIC FEAST
by Angela O'Donnell in Christianity and Literature 56:1 (Autumn 2006), pp. 139-161 [excerpt]
More and more often, in literary journals and conversations, the question arises, “What, exactly, is Christian poetry?” Consideration of such issues used to be confined to books and magazines explicitly religious in their orientation. We expect to find this discussion taking place in the pages of Christianity and Literature or Image; what we may not expect is to find it in traditionally, and even militantly, secular journals. For example, a recent issue of Poetry featured a lengthy essay by Mary Karr reflecting on the influence her Catholic faith has had upon her poems. In fact, Karr herself confesses in the essay to her surprise at receiving the letter soliciting such a piece for that particular journal and to her reluctance to write it. (We, as readers, can be grateful that she finally overcame her hesitancy, as it is a fine piece.) Indeed, a number of writers and critics across various disciplines have noticed a recent sea change, one that is attributed, in part, to 9/11 and subsequent events that have shocked Americans out of our complacency and forced us to consider ultimate questions. Others point to the fact that the election (and re-election) of an evangelical Christian president has brought religion into the realm of political, and therefore social, intellectual, and artistic, discourse. Whatever the cause, or causes, there is little doubt that it has become acceptable, and even intellectually respectable, for the first time in many decades to write about one’s faith.
This has been a great boon for poetry. Granted, there has been a long tradition in the United States of writing from a standpoint of faith, beginning with the Puritan poets of the 17th century and continuing well into the 20th and 21st centuries (witness the popularity of poets such as Thomas Merton and William Everson/Brother Antoninus, and the post-conversion poems of celebrated writers Robert Lowell, Alan Tate, and Denise Levertov, among other examples.) Yet, based on the number of recent collections of poetry that might be termed “Christian,” the proliferation of journals that call for and feature Christian writing, and the many conferences springing up across the country that attract writers who consider themselves to be Christian artists, it seems we are enjoying a renaissance of faith-oriented poetry. Of course, not all of the poetry that might fit this category is necessarily good art—this holds true for poetry published in the past as well as for contemporary poems (the pious and sentimental writings of some lesser 19th-century poets assuredly have their counterparts in our own era). But to my mind, a significant portion of what appears in these journals and what one hears read at these conferences is good and, sometimes, even very good. The five collections of poems that I have the privilege of reviewing for Christianity and Literature are among the best of a number of fine books of Christian poetry that have become available to readers in recent years.
In reading these very different collections, I’ve been considering the question with which I began. Indeed, it is one I am compelled to return to often as a reader, a scholar, and a poet. A case in point: I attended an annual Festival of Writers in Texas several months ago sponsored by the Christian literary journal, Windhover. (Incidentally, it was at this annual conference that I first heard two of these five poets read some of their poems two years ago; in addition, four of the five writers have had poems published in the journal in the last few years.) In the course of the four-day conference, we heard poems that ranged from the openly devotional to ones that celebrated what poet Rod Jellema terms “incarnality” in explicitly secular and religious terms. Very few of the poems were specifically about Christ, none seemed designed primarily to promote what we might term Christian doctrine or dogma, and relatively few even featured references to New Testament events or personages. Some of the poems bore the stamp of the poet’s particular religious observance—both Catholics and Protestants, the lapsed and the practicing, were well represented—but in most cases, this was subtly present, something inferred rather than heard by the listener. Yet all of the poems were embraced by the audience of readers and writers as Christian poems, a capaciousness that I found particularly remarkable since the conference takes place on the campus of a religiously conservative Baptist college situated along the Southern Bible Belt. The gathering seemed a testament to a kind of literary ecumenism that our respective Churches might find enviable.
As I recall that conference and as I read (and reread) these books, I realize that what unifies these poems, so wonderfully disparate in subject matter and in style, and what marks them as Christian, is a common disposition toward the world: the belief that the creation is good; that human experience in the physical world bodies forth certain spiritual truths, and that our actions are meaningful, efficacious, and sacramental in the sense that they are signs of a higher order of reality within which we play a significant role. Most of these poems contain themes and symbols that we readily recognize as part of Christian faith: the sacredness of the body, often represented and expressed in Eucharistic terms; the redemptive power of suffering, modeled most clearly by Christ on the cross, and the fact of the resurrection, analogically represented in the birth and rebirth of all living entities, from the God-Man himself to the smallest sprout. These principles constitute the bedrock upon which the poems are built—-even the ones in which the speakers struggle with darkness and doubt—making them substantial, almost tangible. To borrow another metaphor from Christian tradition, these are poems in which words body forth or enflesh the seemingly abstract beliefs that characterize a Christian disposition towards the world and, thus, invite readers hungry for spiritual and aesthetic sustenance to participate in a linguistic version of the Eucharistic feast. Yet each of these poets accomplishes this end in a unique way, composing a voice, evoking a vision, preparing a dish for the reader’s consumption, that is distinctive and entirely his or her own.
*****
Radiance
In contrast to Jellema’s devotion to the virtues of darkness, Barbara Crooker’s aptly titled new book of poems is a paean to light. These are poems that pay due attention to the shimmering surfaces of things as well as the steady illumination that comes from within, the sort of light that transforms scenes from ordinary life into visions that delight both poet and reader. Crooker’s poems are painterly in the sense that she makes use of the elements of form, color, light, and shade to create pictures belonging to many genres, among them the still-life and the landscape, the intimate portrait and the collage. These are very visual poems, and yet the scenes they evoke appear three-dimensional and appeal to the other senses as well, rendering the reality the poet perceives palpable, a place we’re (mostly) glad to dwell. At times, the magnetic effect produced is not unlike the one the speaker articulates in the poem, “Impressionism” wherein she confesses: “I want to step out / of my life into a painting . . . until sweet forgetfulness takes me, / and the troubles of this world dissolve into daubs / of paint, a blizzard of color and light.”
The speaker creates such an inviting world in the poem “Vegetable Love,” a piece that begins as a celebratory catalogue of garden delights and concludes as a prayer of praise. In the opening lines, the speaker urges us, “Feel a tomato, heft its weight in your palm, / think of buttocks, breasts, this plump pulp.” These fruits and vegetables, “earth’s voluptuaries,” are tactile, fleshy, hot and cold, sweet and crisp, objects one can hold in the hand and taste on the tongue. The language is textured as well, dense with alliteration, assonance and consonance, thick with internal rhyme: “And all the lettuces: bibb, flame, oak leaf, butter- / crunch, black-seeded Simpson, chicory, cos.” The poem, like most others in the collection, seeks to embody in words a world of matter and light, of flesh imbued with spirit, and constitute an incarnational vision in which even the most humble objects become holy. It is no surprise to us at the end of the poem that the speaker urges the reader, “praise what comes from the dirt.”
Indeed, there is a strong aesthetic and spiritual sensibility at work in these poems. Crooker repeatedly looks to the art of Van Gogh, Monet, Renoir, Manet, and Cezanne, all masters of their craft, of expressing the inexpressible, and, we come to find, of practicing the art of suffering. In a number of these poems, the speaker explores parallels between her own experience and that of these artists whose work and lives she has studied and admired. Writing, like painting, is a means of apprehending the beauty of the natural world, capturing it, and conveying it to a viewer or listener. It is also a means of making one’s mark. In “Sunflowers,” the speaker thinks of Van Gogh’s wheat fields, musing on his longings and his sorrows and on her own: “When we’re gone, what will be left of our small / songs and minor joys? Still, when I drive by a wheat field . . . something in me rises, makes me look / for a scrap of paper, a pencil nub, / even as the hot wind lifts, / blows the dust we are, carries it away.” This human urge to create art, to make something out of our experience, even though our life here is short and our attempts to make it stop and stay futile, is irresistible as it is inexplicable and is, finally, a cause for joy. The painters Crooker admires as they persist in their craft through sickness, disability, and old age, model for her, and for all artists, a passion for their art that outstrips the ability to create it. She embodies this ideal memorably in a single scene appearing in the poem, “The Hour of Peonies:” “At the end, confined to a wheelchair, / paintbrushes strapped to his arthritic hands, / Renoir said, ‘the limpidity of the flesh, one wants to caress it.’”
Crooker approaches this set of themes in a variety of ways. In a very different sort of poem, “The Unfinished Work in Blue and Gold,” the poet creates another analogy between her work and that of a painter as she searches for the right words to describe a landscape just as an artist searches for the right color:
The sky, blue as the robes of Titian’s Madonna,
this gold, the leaves of the Osage Orange,
it could come from Monet’s haystacks,
but that’s not quite right either—-
Maybe the gold is a solo by Charlie Parker,
notes turned liquid in the autumn sun,
maybe the blue is the implacable sky
where Van Gogh’s church at Auvers
floats off the earth.
What takes the reader by surprise in the poem is the disarming self-consciousness of the speaker--her acknowledgement that she hasn’t gotten it “quite right” and it’s likely she won’t—-and the sudden appearance of Charlie Parker, an artist of a very different stamp from herself or the painters she looks to for guidance. It is, in fact, this element of the unexpected detail, the veering off from the well-traveled road that characterizes Crooker’s work. She juxtaposes words, objects, images, and experiences we would not ordinarily associate with one another, thus enabling the reader to see fresh relationships among things in this world.
There is often an element of play in this juxtaposition, as in the poem “Nearing Menopause, I Run Into Elvis at Shoprite” wherein the speaker imagines an encounter with The King himself at the grocery store as his voice sounds through the cheap PA system, over the shelves of toilet paper rolls, “above the chains of flesh and time.” The message he brings the aging speaker is simple and encouraging, “Anyway you do is fine.” A similar ear and eye for the absurd is at work in “Stand Up, Stand Up,” a version of a found poem in which the speaker strings together bits and snatches of songs, local commercials, and station identifications she hears on the radio while driving through the Blue Ridge Mountains one Sunday morning.
Another poem that employs juxtaposition is one of Crooker’s darker pieces, “The Gyre.” Though the collection, as a whole, is celebratory and practices the discipline of gratitude, it is, like life, seeded with sorrow and loss. Several of these poems focus on the challenge of raising and living with an autistic son and one, perhaps the most poignant of all, speaks suddenly and unexpectedly of the loss of the speaker’s first child (“Books Reviewed in The New York Times, Sunday, June 9, 2002”). “The Gyre” is a meditation on repetition and obsession. The speaker hears the repetitive cry of the owl, a sound which sets in motion a series of associations in her mind:
Unable to sleep, I thought of Monet
at eighty, painting waterlilies, pond, and sky
over 250 times. He wrote, ‘These landscapes
of water and reflections
have become an obsession for me.”
And my compulsive son asks questions
without answers ad infinitum
in an endless loop: “What time is 12 o’clock
midnight? When is it Saturday?
Where is Hurricane Floyd?
Will you marry me all the time?”
The small word “and” here is the key to the poem, the inevitability with which the speaker moves from a nineteenth-century French painter’s relentless search for aesthetic perfection to her autistic son’s relentless attempts to make sense of a reality that, finally, cannot be made sense of. The themes of repetition for its own sake and of unanswerable questions return in the third and final verse paragraph as the speaker answers the owl’s insistent cry of “who who who?” with her own interrogative “why why why?” The night scene is presided over by “the full moon, / that great blank disk in the sky” which appears in both the beginning and ending of the poem, persistent in its own repetitive action as it “keeps on shining.” The implied connections among all of these disparate voices—-owl, poet, painter, and child—-are surprising and moving. Even though each of these figures feels him or herself to be isolated and alone, the poem conjoins them in a kind of fellowship—-it may be a fellowship of loneliness, but it is fellowship nonetheless. Thus, even a poem conceived of as a lament offers some small consolation.
The radiant world that Crooker’s poems paint and celebrate, explore and ponder, is one that is meaningful as well as beautiful. They demonstrate in their attention to the things of this world that the latter have much to teach us. The lessons of Radiance are many and serve to remind us of the sacredness of creation and our obligation to act as good stewards towards the earth and towards one another: “Everything glorious is around us,” “Love whatever you can,” “Though darkness gathers, praise our crazy / fallen world; it’s all we have, and it’s never enough."
Review:
Radiance , 2007
reviewed by Janet McCann in Windhover
It is rare to pick up a new book of poetry, read it all, and put it down feeling good. Radiance is a collection that shimmers, yet it is an honest book that does not shy away from the pain and loss that is an inevitable part of experience. The lift of the book comes from the suggestion that life is luminous, even when troubled or threatened; beauty itself is redemptive. Beauty costs, in terms of suffering and self denial, but the costs are worth it. The poems have the effect of the impressionist paintings they describe and follow. These are poems of praise, the light and dark in them so interwoven that they form a seamless glimmering fabric.
Barbara Crooker’s Radiance is the winner of the Word Press First Book Prize and most of its poems have been published in literary journals, including The Christian Century, Windhover, Potomac Review, Christianity and Literature, Cream City Review, The Valparaiso Poetry Review, Poetry International, and others. Crooker has won numerous poetry awards, including the 2004 W.B. Yeats Society of New York Award, the 2003 Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Contest, the 2000 New Millennium Writing’s Y2K competition. She has had three Pennsylvania Council of the Arts Fellowships, ten residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and a National Endowment for the Arts Award.
Garrison Keillor read her poems "Nearing Menopause, I Run Into Elvis at Shoprite," "Away in Virginia, I See a Mustard Field and Think of You," "In the Middle," and "Ordinary Life" on The Writer's Almanac. Her work has also been read on the Australian Broadcasting Company's show Poetica. Author of ten chapbooks, Crooker has won two chapbook competitions. Ordinary Life was the winner of the 2001 ByLine Chapbook Competition and Impressionism won the Grayson Books Chapbook Competition in 2004. She lives with her husband and son in Pennsylvania, and she also has two grown daughters and a grandson.
Radiance is Crooker's first full-length book. Each poem in this collection provides a startling glimpse into an unusually gifted mind; all together they create a vibrant world. Barbara Crooker’s subjects are not unusual–-the events of daily life, taking care of an autistic son, thinking about and viewing art, traveling here and there on errands, small transactions with others of the community. The book has two loci, the ordinary and often frustrating Here and the shimmering impressionist surface of There, art, France. But the two are not opposites and divorced–-they touch each other. The ordinary is touched by glimmer; the faraway beautiful is made understandable by the experience of the ordinary. The overlaps and separations of the two worlds of the poems produces an effect of the spiritual. These poems are transcendent, both art and nature touched with the holy. Art invades life, redeeming the ordinary, and life permeates art.
This spiritual poetry is nondenominational, not visibly affiliated with a set of standard beliefs, but the presence of the Creator in creation is everywhere. The poems help to explain one another as they explore various escapes from the prison of self through the magic of natural beauty, the giving of self in human love, the sense of connection with others, and the mysteries of and beyond human experience. The writer's sense of wonder and discovery coexists with her knowledge of pain and loss.
The title Radiance is evocative of the contents--it evokes a kind of glory that hangs over the world as a fullness at life's best and a promise at its worst. There is not a title poem, but the radiance appears in all of them, and is reflected in titles: "All That Is Glorious Around Us," "The Irrational Numbers of Longing, The Infinite Mathematics of Desire," "Sometimes I Am Startled Out of Myself," "Praise Song, "The Unfinished Work in Blue and Gold."
And another way of glimpsing Crooker's perspective is to look at the ends of the poems. They all provide closure, but not closing-off; they bring the interplay of light and dark, the desire to soar against the weight of gravity, into balance. Even the last words of poems of the difficult world provide hope and joy. Quoting last lines tends to diminish poems, but the concluding portion of one poem might serve as illustration. From "The Hour of Peonies":
At the end, confined to a wheelchair,
paintbrushes strapped to his arthritic hands,
Renoir said, "the limpidity of the flesh, one wants to caress it."
Even after the petals have fallen, the lawn is full of snow,
the last act in Swan Lake where the corps de ballet,
in their feathered tutus,
kneel and kiss the ground, cover it in light.
This poem combines the themes of the creation of beauty through suffering, the need for beauty, the recognitition of time's inexorable passage and the erasure of beauty--and yet the final words are "cover it in light." This becomes the drive and duty of artist and poet--whose activities are their destiny as well as their delight.
In the art poems we see how the pains of artists’ lives are transformed into beauty. The artists named and represented here are known for their incorporation of light into paintings and for their lack of dark colors and clear, definite shapes; things are as they appear, clothed in the luminous. Ordinarily life has harsh outlines, but the mind and heart see the possibilities and not only the realities. Van Gogh, Manet, Monet, Cezanne provide themes as well as images and vision. The poet segues back and forth from art to life, from France to rural middle America. The Impressionist sensibility can be equated with awareness of wonder, and the images she sees are touched with the miraculous. The desperately unhappy lives of some of the painters–-Van Gogh for instance–-create the most intense beauty, giving a sense of purpose to all that happens. Beauty is created through suffering; therefore suffering is not completely without value. While there is not an affirmation of the dolorist belief that suffering helps others, there is a sense that the darkness of life belongs too in the scheme of things.
“The Deconstruction of Snow” is a powerful poem that ties Crooker's themes together, and plays with the interconnection between art and life, trawling through literary theory while keeping one eye on the reality of this “text” of the snowfall itself. The poem begins by pointing out that “snow itself is an absence” and that it cannot be made into a “presence”
Attempt to pin it down on black velvet
like a Great Spangled Fritillary,
Mourning Cloak, or some other
Lepidoptera. Hah. Not in this
postmodern universe. Realism,
Naturalism, those quaint notions
we still carry, like metal lunchboxes
with Roy Rogers or Rin Tin Tin.
Narrative theory, science, all explanations fail. But in deconstructing snow she reconstructs it, allowing the snow itself to be teller and tale. The conclusion is triumphant, making the snowfall a demonstration of creation. The tone is mocking and "deconstructive"--yet at the same time it is affirmative.
Meanwhile, high above us,
in the great kitchen of the clouds
the Chief Pastry Chef
is sifting, sifting.
(There’s that darned allusion
slipping in again,
silent as the fall of flake
on flake.)
And that same old self-referential snow,
noun and verb at the same time,
keeps on falling
in straight lines,
telling its story
to anyone
who will listen.
But no matter.
The text is everything.
The only thing.
The rest is diamond-dazzled
glitter-feathered
hexagonal-crystalled
silence.
This teasing poem has several coherent readings, but its conclusion is a resounding affirmation of what is thought of as a negation: silence. But what a breathtaking beautiful silence; and the picture of silence as dazzling, etc. has resonances far beyond the snow.
These poems show craft and courage as well as passion. It is hazardous to speak directly of the subjects Crooker chooses, and to accept the possibility of “radiance” in any form. But the poems are startlingly persuasive because she is not glossing over the realities or presenting a poem Pollyanna; she is not pretending. The poems are real, and the life they exude is persuasive. They earn the lift they give to the reader.
This is unusual religious poetry that does not use the conventional language of Christianity. One might ask: What sanctifies an ordinary life, and turns that life itself into poetry? In other words, what makes for religious poetry that is not directly hymn-like, explicit? I think the answer in part is reverent attention: to all natural and human surroundings, to art, to the transcendent. And another part is compassion, compassion that comes from not being so imprisoned in the self as to make the other unreal, And yet a third factor, of course, is the recognition and awareness of a spiritual dimension. In these poems there is a kind of natural acceptance of the transcendent, and a celebration of nature in which its transcendence is made manifest. This acceptance recalls the uses of nature in both Gerard Manley Hopkins’ and Mary Oliver’s work–-as different as these poets are, they perceive the divine in the natural, and make the reader see it too. And so does Barbara Crooker. Nature and art are occasions of praise and celebration. They are touched with dazzlement. What is seen is not the dark veil but the shining reality behind it. “Quiscalus Quiscula” ends:
These grackles are angels of the Lord,
and we are just fooled by their robes of soot.
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 tot he cherries, a small stream
of violets underneath, it’s over-the-top, the Fauvism
of spring. Maybe the blackbird’s song isn an inexplicable
mystery, or as plain as black and blue:
Love whatever you can.
What’s intriguing about Crooker is her mixture of metaphysics and humor–-life imitates art, and it is all infused with Presence, but there is a smile to the cosmic comedy too, and to the comparisons the poet brings to illustrate it. Many of these poems can barely contain their good humor, which is a spontaneous product of seeing nature and making metaphors. "Kissing the ground"--a borrowed image--becomes a trope for this creativity that is also homage, as in the final poem, "Poem Ending with a Line by Rumi":
Once, down in the woods, four deer crossed
the road in front of me. It was first frost,
and every blade and twig was etched in white.
Their breath plumes hung in the air long after
they vanished in the underbrush.
The silence was so deep, the only sound, leaf falling on leaf.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
Crooker's metaphors spring forth like glossolalia, and are infused with spirit.
The art leaps into the natural picture, "The Fauvism / of Spring." The suggestion throughout the collection seems to be that a great creativity is at the bottom of things, and we share it with the Divinity--it is part of the image in which we are created. And, finally, what could be more joyous than sheer invention--the spontaneity of the pouring forth of ideas and things, birds and paintings and poems. And all forms of happiness are admixed: pleasure, joy, bliss, delight, fun. The flowing forth of this tide is what characterizes Radiance.
