Reviews & Interviews
Review:
Radiance , 2006
Reviewed by Geri Rosenzweig in miller’s pond
In Radiance, Pennsylvania poet Barbara Crooker takes us into the radiance of the ordinary in extraordinary ways, with language, image, color, and sound that is anything but ordinary. Here is a poet engaged with the earth’s green secrets, in language that is spiritual and at the same time, earthy. Her full out love of “this radiant world”, rare and unapologetic today among collections of poetry, is startling. The poems positively shout for acceptance of what is given in our lives, be it suffering or just the daily ness of life. Crooker is a “promise…an open road stretched out before you”, and I for one am glad to travel that road with her poems ringing in my ears. In "Vegetable Love," she suggests
“feel a tomato, heft its weight in your palm,
think of buttocks, breasts, this plump pulp…”
“peppers, thick walls of cool jade, a green hush”
The language in the above lines fill the mouth with luscious consonants and vowels.
I imagine her rolling words around in her mouth, savoring the sounds and tastes; is it possible to look at vegetables again without thinking of their eroticisms, their “green hush.” The poem, "The Gyre" starts
“…the owl woke me
I heard him ask the moon
in his rising tremolo, who who who…”
The dusky Os in these lines mimic owl, moon, woke, the three line stanza, with its two and three line beat taps the ear, asks the mind to wake up and listen to what is often ignored in the rush of our lives. Her poems flow on the page, leading us from paintings by Van Gogh to Cezanne; in "Nature Morte au Plat et Pommes, still life by Cezanne" she fills the page with color the way the painter filled the canvas with
“apples…their roundness, plump globes
of red, yellow, green… oil on canvas…”
But then she invites us to think about the fruit itself, in all its realness, its flesh, the dirt from which it came, the black seeds at its heart, the crunch and bite of it, the sugar we love dripping down our chin, and comes down on the side of life as against “still life”, telling us,
“the body that argues against still life…says,
I am alive on this green earth, and I want more”
In Twenty Five of Rejection Slips, she writes with humor for all of us who send poems out to the world.
“How many trees have been pulped
for this constant susurrus, sending, researching,
shuffling, sorting?
Even the name submission suggests a certain deference,
servility, prostration…
What writer can’t identify with a poem like this?
In "Autism Poem: The Grid," this mother of an autistic son writes about her son watching a spider:
“What does he see in his world, where geometry
is more beautiful than a human face?”
These lines are more than beautiful, she writes them without a hint of sentimentality; they come from some deep place in the writer where self pity is not permitted as her heart
“not cleanly cut like a valentine
“expands and contracts, contracts and expands.”
This is a profound book from a writer living her life without bitterness or irony. Her voice is assured, comfortable. Reading her poems is like talking to a friend on a summer’s evening, shadows mingle with the light, but in the end, “just what you have manages to be enough.” Barbara Crooker has something new to teach us about being in the world with grace and generosity. What has been given here gleams like a jewel discovered in the lining of a coat, and I accept it with gratitude and the deep-down pleasure of reading a poet who can say in the last line of the last poem in this shimmering book: “There are hundreds of ways to kneel down and kiss the ground.”
Review:
Radiance , 2006
--by Penelope Scambly Schott, in Cream City Review
It was about 1980 when I first ran into a poem by Barbara Crooker. I tore it out of the journal (my own copy, not from the library), and posted it over my desk. After that I watched for her work. She was a woman who spoke directly to me.
Until the happy publication of Radiance, Barbara Crooker was one of the best known of our contemporary poets who had never published a full-length book. In fact, she has a poem in this collection called, “Twenty-five Years of Rejection Slips,” which concludes:
Look, clouds are writing their manuscripts on the big blue book
of the sky. They don’t fear the wind’s erasure, or night’s
emphatic black rejection. Tomorrow, a clean sheet comes up
in the roller, and we’ll start all over again.
Fortunately, she has never stopped writing. Her poems have been appearing widely since the early 1980's. Who could forget a poem called, “Nearing Menopause, I Run into Elvis at the Shoprite”? Crooker has won some major prizes and published numerous chapbooks including Writing Home, Obbligato, The White Poems, and most recently Impressionism. After she mailed her Pudding House collection Greatest Hits,1980-2002 to Garrison Keillor, he selected several of her poems to read aloud on
his daily radio program the Writer’s Almanac. Keillor writes of Radiance, “It’s a straight-ahead passionate book by a mature poet and rather suddenly I’ve become a fan.”
Among poets, the kiss of Keillor can be a mixed blessing. He is a popularizer of poetry, almost a salesman. His anthology Good Poems has received some of the same criticisms as has Billy Collins’ Poetry 180, a collection of poems meant to be read one a day over the loudspeaker in school. What these poems have in common is accessibility; you can understand such a poem by hearing it once. Our language poets and other modernists object to accessible poems, sometimes with good reason. In the age of slams and instant gratification, there are too many poems that don’t merit a second reading. But that is not the case with Barbara Crooker’s poetry. Her work is that unusual combination of direct and lush.
Radiance is a rich book, full of pain and beauty. Some of the poems come from her individual challenges, such as having an autistic child, and others come from her encounters with the blessings of this world–nature, art, and above all, love. The book opens and closes with praise. In the first poem, “All That Is Glorious Around Us,” the poet admires not just “grand vistas, sublime peaks,” but also
...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.
After the whole journey, the book closes with “Poem Ending with a Line by Rumi,” which moves from white-throated sparrows to four deer vanishing in underbrush.
The silence was so deep, the only sound, leaf falling on leaf,
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
There is a kind of generosity in the fact that Crooker concludes her own book with the words of another poet. Although these poems are told from the mind and heart of one woman, they are not self-centered. Even when writing about her autistic son, she tries to see as he sees. In “Autism Poem: The Grid,” she asks,
What does he see in his world, where geometry
is more beautiful than a human face?
I read through this book greedily, carried along by the music and the passion, and then went back to read as a reviewer, asking two important questions: first, How do these poems operate? and, last, How is this book put together? Unlike many highly accessible poems, these poems carry a full context within them. The poet has read widely, traveled, and considered, so that each poem contains its own complex world.
One devastating poem incorporates titles of books from a single day’s book review section:
Books Reviewed in The New York Times, Sunday, June 9, 2002
When I Was a Girl, summers stretched forever;
Back Then, all those hours were my own, tall cool
tumblers waiting to be filled. I’d bike to the library,
Nancy Drews and Bobbsey Twins, their blue cardboard covers
faintly musty, stacked to the top of the wire basket that hung
over the fat front tire. Deep in the Shade of Paradise,
how could I know I was Creating a Life of words,
what I needed to bring me Across Open Ground,
where The Sound of Trees talking to each other
was conversation enough. Due dates were stamped
with a rubber wheel, inked from a black pad.
Some books, I couldn’t return on time, paid the fine
with my own allowance. Years later, my first child
was born, then died, on her due date. Books were my salvation.
Nothing Remains the Same. Walk Through Darkness.
In all of Crooker’s poems, the fully realized images are connected by feeling and thought. Then there is the overall arrangement of the book. Its division into six sections is more seasonal than thematic. As we read, we are moving from October, to winter, to spring, to summer, through a flashback into childhood, and back into October. This circular quality suggests a fully adult awareness of patterns and inevitabilities. While each poem stands alone, the sense of movement of the whole adds still another level of meaning. In short, this is a strong and beautiful
Review:
Radiance , 2006
by Judith H. Montgomery in Calyx
From cover to last lines, Radiance shimmers with beauty retrieved from suffering’s dark pinch. The cover—T.W. Whittredge’s “Kaaterskill Falls” (1865)—offers a spectacular view of distant cliffs, a thread of towering falls. But, “radiance” lies in the foreground: flame of turning leaves, pine spire, late-lit sky; fall: the time of last brilliant earthly flare. Crooker’s poems weave praise and lamentation within glow and shadow, rising to joy/ enough to unbalance the equation (“Some October”). Her poems celebrate through intoxicating language, a passion for the colors and forms of Impressionist painters, and a firm grounding in exquisitely observed details of the natural and human worlds.
Radiance received the Word Press First Book Prize—an honor perhaps overdue after many other awards (including the W.B. Yeats prize and the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award) and ten chapbooks. Crooker begins the book by foregoing grand vistas for intimate everyday pleasure: the steam from white chicken chili, two cups of dark coffee,/watching the red and gold leaves race down the street (“All That Is Glorious Around Us”) and ends by calling us to our hands and knees, the better to appreciate a mourning cloak, the row of cobalt dots hidden/in the black stripes on its tawny wings (“Poem Ending with a Line by Rumi”). We savor the tomato’s red heft, the naked slope of a lover’s back, even the metallic, raucous calling of grackles. And throughout, she drenches us in color—Van Gogh’s bruise-blue/ irises that wince against the yellow wall
(“Sunflowers”)—and reaches to synaesthesia: the gold . . .a solo by Charlie Parker,/notes turned liquid in the autumn sun (“The Unfinished Work in Blue and Gold”).
Yet she weights her praise, speaking out of the places/ of brokenness, . . . the places where grief/has strung me out to dry (“Sometimes, I Am Startled Out of Myself”), a world of too much death/for anyone to take in” (“Impressionism”). Those sorrows are characteristically woman’s, especially the burden of caretaking: her struggle to raise an autistic son; the slow breath-choked death of her mother; the old sock of marriage; her body as she moves into middle age and looks squarely beyond at gathering shadows; and woman’s struggle to carve out a life of art from the everyday demands of the world.
The poems deftly interweave pain and praise. Her deep enjoyment of a meal in a café is shadowed by her awareness of her mother’s illness: And I think/of how my mother struggles to breathe, how few good days/she has now. Pained, but not self-pitying, she immediately lifts to contemplation: how we never think about the glories/of breath, oxygen cascading down our throats to the lungs,/simple as the journey of water over rock (“All That Is Glorious Around Us”).
Sometimes her son’s obsessive questioning (What time is 12 o’clock/midnight” . . . will you marry me all the time?) leaves her lying bleakly awake under the obliviously shining moon, that great blank disk in the sky (“The Gyre”). But, like G.M. Hopkins, she struggles through despair to redemption as she considers Van Gogh’s tormented obsessions and the resulting artistic creations that make . . . [t]he suffering/world [recede] in the background.
Part of her weaving is woman’s longing for escape—into art, into words, into Crooker’s personal paradise, France. Weighted with responsibility, she longs to be doing nothing:
Over there, Renoir’s villagers are still dazzled and dappled
by the sun in the Moulin de la Galette, and petit déjeuner
in a garden of irises or an aperitif of vin rouge and a bowl
of olives under dusty plane trees are encore paradis.
(“Impressionism”)
Though Crooker shows her greatest strength in poems that wrestle pain and praise, her book is leavened with moments of wry humor—her life as a writer (“Twenty-Five Years of Rejection Slips”), her body as full-blown French bloom:
. . . 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,
rosy nipples, full bellies, an amplitude of flesh, luxe, calme
et volupté. . . .
(“The Hour of Peonies”)
Radiance is a sensuous and defiant hedge against mortality, a book of transformation—of body, art, self—and of blissfully persisting desire, a marc, an eau-de-vie, hot and heady/in the blood (“In Paris”). She illuminates the world, stippled with pain and loss, with spirit; she anneals a woman’s—and a woman poet’s—sorrows and struggle with celebration. On the last day of my life, she says, 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, as the rain comes down, solid blocks of purple, blue. Crooker praises; she consoles. She sets us back to blossom on the path of creation.
