Reviews & Interviews

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 , 2006
“Will You Marry Me All the Time?”
by John Jenkinson, in Image

Of our contemporary poets, perhaps Barbara Crooker has taken the longest route to a first full-length book. Radiance appears in the wake of numerous awards including the Thomas Merton Poetry Prize, 12 chapbooks, 500+ published poems-–and amply rewards our patience.
Crooker weighs our human imperfections on the transitory scales of sensorial tropes. Throughout the collection, the palpable tension between nature, humanity, and the divine, rises to the spark of transcendence, of release, that flashes resolution. The opening poem, “All That Is Glorious Around Us,” offers this glimpse of an ordinary street scene, “where the last car to park has left its mark on the glistening / street, this radiant world.” The automobile morphs into a wild beast ‘marking’ its territory-–not with urine, but with a rainbow.
An aficionado of the painter’s art, Crooker’s images remain masterfully suggestive, delivered crisply, cleanly, even when her metaphor edges toward the fantastic, as in “Nocturne in Blue,” where, synestheticly, she captures a Parisian mood as “. . . just a condensation of blue, / distilled in a small glass bottle with a stopper, / as if it came from an expensive parfumerie, / musk of the centuries, the gathering dusk, / a hedge against night, the world that will end.”
This book is Crooker’s love song to the real-–from an autistic son’s “flicks and stims” to the “improper fractions” of a husband’s “smooth surface.” She utters praise for such unlikely bearers of salvation as a predatory hawk/Christ: “All summer long, I hear him, his faint call of blood, / though he stays high up, a speck, a mote, a floater. / His hunger sharpens, honed on the strop of the wind” (“The Woman Who Called Hawks from the Sky”).
As evidence of the sympathy and skill with which this book brims, here’s a lean, evocative image-–Li Po, perhaps, via Charles Wright, from “Some October”: “Today, the wind poured out of Canada, / a river in flood, bringing down the brilliant leaves, / broken sticks and twigs, deserted nests.” The book is brooding, the poet wild with love. Barbara Crooker’s carefully crafted and unusually fluent free verse leads this reader, time and again, to think, I wish I’d written that.

Review:

Radiance , 2006
Review by Sybil Estess in The Texas Review

Radiance by Barbara Crooker. Word Press, WordTech Communications. 84 pp. $17.00 paper; Pascal Goes to the Races by Janet McCann, WordTech Communications. 84 pages, $17.00 paper

Barbara Crooker and Janet McCann are mature, accomplished poets. Crooker resides in rural Pennsylvania, while McCann is a professor of English and Creative Writing at Texas A&M University.

Crooker's 10 chapbooks include Impressionism, Ordinary Life, Welcome Home, and In the Late Summer Garden. She has won the W. B. Yeats Society of New York Award and The Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award and received fellowships from The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. She was also the runner-up in the Paterson Poetry Prize in 2006.

McCann's chapbooks include Looking for the Buddha in the Barbed-Wire Garden, Afterword, Ghosts at Christmas, Dialogue with the Dogcatcher, and How They Got Here. Janet McCann also has published academic books, including a Twayne volume on Wallace Stevens. The editor of several anthologies, she has co-authored In a Field of Words, a creative writing textbook published by Prentice Hall (2002). McCann won a National Endowment of the Arts grant in 1989.

Radiance is an inspiring volume, from which Garrison Keillor has twice read poems on his radio program The Writer's Almanac. Some of Crooker's most prominent concerns are the sublimity of the quotidian, a love of painting (especially Impressionism), and an obsession with light, particularly that of southern France.

The word radiance suggests light shining and refracting into divergent rays. To radiate means to send out light from the center. (Radiation can be a healing agent as well.) The title of the initial poem in this volume announces Crooker's most prominent theme concerning this concept: "All That Is Glorious [is] Around Us":
[It] is not, for me, these grand vistas, sublime peaks . .. overlooks, towering clouds, but doing errands on a day of driving rain, staying dry inside the silver skin of the car,
160,000 miles, still running just fine.
everything glorious is around us already:
this radiant world.

One is reminded not only of current poets such as Mary Oliver when reading Crooker's work, but of imagists such as Pound or W.C. Williams, since, for Crooker, "so much depends" on one's particular habits of perceiving radiance in the everyday world.

Sometimes this poet seems to "want to step out/ of [her] life into a painting, perhaps Van Gogh's Cafe I de la Nuit." She seems to want "the troubles of this world to dissolve into daubs/ of paint, a blizzard of color and light" ("Impressionism"). Yet by the third poem in the book we are reminded that Barbara Crooker remains grounded in the complexity of the human: in relationships, in love. We see as much in the first lines from "The Irrational Numbers of Longing, The Infinite Mathematics of Desire":

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,
the way my fingers travel the back road of your spine,
the landscape of our bodies under the quilt.
where we come together in the dark.

Yet other poems of Crooker's recall life's sadder sides. In "Autism Poem: The Grid," the poet writes, "My son, who is eleven doesn't talk . . . / And real life / is messy and vague." Crooker often uses a longish free-verse line to create her very pleasing poetic rhythm. Many of her line-breaks are exquisitely chosen:

The opossum that used to live in the thorny tangle
of wild roses is dead this winter; I found his body
as the snow melted, the same March that the Comet...
passed us by. I've been out these clear nights looking
at its smudgy brightness.... ("The Cornet and the Opossum")

This poet is not afraid of statements. "For snow itself is an absence," "The text is everything," "All we do is pass through here, the best way we can." And, "Oh, the fierce / burning joys of this life; all the things of the world about to vanish." The speaker is sometimes exhortative, even didactic: "Love whatever you can." The final poem in the volume, "Poem Ending with a Line by Rumi," closes with the Persian mystic's line, " There are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground." By the time Barbara Crooker quotes this line in her newest book, however, she herself has "kissed the ground" many times over, as we see in the ending of "The Hour of Peonies":

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.

Whereas light for impressionistic painters often reflects the relationship of pure colors, for Crooker it can relate to human relationships as well. In "Provence," she writes,
. . .Vincent wrote, "There is no blue without yellow,"

"Just as you and I walk along [the Rhone's] banks tonight,
man and woman, light and reflection, point and counterpoint.
And if one of us goes on the last journey
into the long dark? There is no gold without blue, no yin
without yang, no me without you." ("In Provence")

It is very hard to get too much of such deft and delicious poetry.
"Sometimes, just what you have / manages to be enough." ("Happiness")