Reviews & Interviews
Review:
Radiance , 2006
Lois Roma-Deeley in American Poetry Journal
Ringdoves Chanting
O mother of leaves and sweetness
Who are these pietas?
The shadows of ringdoves chanting, but easing nothing.
-Sylvia Plath
The poems in Radiance, Barbara Crooker's first full-length collection (Word Press 2005), both reflect and reveal a world which is polished to a high sheen by the poet's passionate intelligence.
These poems move in and out of a reality which is filled with the quotidian-nature ("Some October"), marriage ("Away in Virginia, I See a Mustard Field and Think of You,) travel ("In Paris") and even housework ("A Woman is Pegging Wash on the Line."). Yet there are other realities lurking beneath and behind the poet's consciousness -an intimate knowledge of autism as well as fine art. This interplay of themes come together to create a point and counterpoint structure-to Crooker's collection. In this book, the world of "everyday happenings" is worthy of praise but is also imbued with deep longing and great despair.
For example, Crooker's poem "Sometimes, I Am Startled Out of Myself' the reader is taken on a journey through time ("like this morning") and place (places of brokenness, the places where grief/has strung me out to dry") to be spiritually lifted by nature (..."The geese glide over the cornfields") only to arrive at the conclusion that we-both poet and reader- must leam to live with the emotional dissonance that any human life is simultaneously brutalizing and transcendent. We must learn to"pass through here, the best way we can."
Further, Crooker's poems which deal with autism ("Autism Poem: The Grid," "Autism Poem: Bricks,") mingle with poems which deal with fine art ("Iris, 1889" "All There Is to Say"). However, the collection takes on a luminous quality when the reader comes to poems which deal with autism and art. For example, in "White Lilacs," a poem created in response to a painting by Edouard Manet, Crooker writes:
When the world
was reduced to a black flag
of pain, what else could he do
But paint flowers, white
lilacs in a crystal vase,
prismatic in the May sunlight,
their heavy perfume
filling the room?
And what can I do
When my autistic son
shuts down, talks nonsense,
flicks and stims....
Here Crooker asks the reader to confront the "flicks and stims" of her or his human life. The collection ask the reader to consider this question: what does one do in the face of great pain?
The answer for Crooker seems to be that it is in the wanting to "rise above the blood, the dirt, the earth" ("Against Nostalgia") that one will, finally, come to an unflinching acceptable nobility.
Finally, we must learn, as Crooker writes in "Praise Song"
....Though darkness gathers, praise our crazy
fallen world; it's all we have, and it's never enough.
But it is, according to the poems in this collection, enough to keep us brave.
Review:
Radiance , 2006
Jackson Wheeler in Solo
Radiance, Barbara Crooker (Word Press, Cincinnati, 2005). Surprisingly, this is Barbara Crooker's first full length book and winner of the Word Press First Book Prize. I use the word surprisingly, because these poems celebrating the beauty of the ordinary are so deftly written that I find it difficult to believe that editors and publishers had not already beaten a path to her door earlier. Her mantra throughout this very fine collection is find the beauty. She tells the reader, in the opening poem, "All That is Glorious Around Us," ". . .But everything glorious is around/us already;" Ms. Crooker does not sugar coat the realities of the world, a disabled child:
And my compulsive son asks questions without answers ad
infinitum in an endless loop: 'What time is 12 o 'dock
midnight? When is it Saturday? Where is Hurricane Floyd?
Will you marry me all the time?" Over and over, he pinches,
face, arms, and chest.
She understands that the world may at times be reduced to a "black flag of pain" and that she is mortal, but her poems testify more to the "fierce burning joys of this life. . ." she is not afraid to risk sentimentality by declaring, in the love poem, "Provence," ". . .There is no gold without blue, no yin/without yang, no me without you" nor is she afraid to poke fun at the process which gradually "blows the dust we are, . . " in poems like, "Nearing Menopause, I Run Into Elvis at Shoprite," and "Why Monday Mornings Do Not Resemble the Shozui Temple." In a poem near the end of this superb collection Crooker makes it clear that she wants the last word; after reading this rewarding first full length collection, I'm inclined to let her have it.
Review:
Radiance , 2005
Reviewed in The Upper Case by Shirley Stevens
When people in my workshops ask me how to improve their poetry, I tell them to read poems by good poets. Those who read Barbara Crooker's new collection Radiance, winner of the Word Press First Book Prize, are in for both a treat and a lesson in writing. As I read this book cover to cover, I enjoyed old favorites and discovered new ones.
If you ask yourself why you continue writing poems, consider Barbara's response in "Sunflowers":
When we're gone, what will be left of our small
songs and minor joys? Still, when I drive by a wheat field
turning ochre and amber, every awn and arista shouting sun!
sun! sun! 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.
Notice that Barbara uses words which make us see in a fresh way. Have we ever looked closely at our world so that we notice the awns, or bristles, on each head of wheat?
Those of us who have submitted our poetry for publication can relate to her poem "Twenty-Five Years of Rejection Slips." The speaker asks,
How many trees have been pulped
for this constant susurrus: sending, resending, shuffling, sorting?
Even the name submissions suggests a certain deference,
servility, prostration: lying down in front of the mailbox,
and letting the great steamroller of indifference flatten
me into the ground.
Have you ever mailed a rustling, or susurrus, of papers to an editor? Have you ever been flattened by the steamroller of rejection?
In her poems, Barbara celebrates the world in which we live. Her exuberance is evident in "All That is Glorious Around Us." She celebrates ordinary things and people:
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.
As you read her poems, you will travel to France to view Renoir's villagers, Van Gogh's wheat fields, and Cezanne's still life paintings. She will also make you take a trip to your back yard to look at vegetables in a new way. You will see the zucchini torpedoes "lurking in the Sargasso depths" and onions with their "green flames singing in the hearth."
I remember Barbara's workshop at St. Davids when she challenged us to write about an onion, hi her poem she brings vegetables to life , encourages us to view them with zest:
Quick, before the frost pots oat its green light,
praise these vegetables, earth's voluptuaries,
praise what comes from the dirt.
Barbara Crooker, in her poem "Sometimes, I Am Startled Out of Myself," writes about how we view our world and how we write. She encourages us to be more aware of our world and to share what we see and feel. She concludes,
You do not have to be wise. Even a goose knows
how to find shelter, where the corn still lies
in the stubble and dried stalks. All we do
is pass through here, the best way we can.
They stitch up the sky, and it is whole again.
Geese, and poets, do that. They stitch up the sky, and we experience the healing words and images.
Art is one of the things I'm passionate about, like
gardening, my family, my son with autism, love in a
long-term relationship, travel to France, the love of
God, the things that keep cropping up in my work.
Even though, with the latter, there's nothing overt, I
hope the entire book can be read as a hymn of praise.
Barbara Crooker
