Reviews & Interviews
Review:
Radiance , 2005
reviewed in Rattle by Marjorie Maddox
Seventeen-time nominee for a Pushcart Prize, recipient of numerous national awards, and author often chapbooks, Barbara Crooker was long overdue for a first-book award. With the publication of Radiance (2005 Word Press Prize), her audience can once again applaud. The collection glows with what we wake to, what we breathe in, what we sleep by. Radiance catches the joy of shadows and the shadows of joy in the rooms where we live everyday.
I first encountered Crooker's work as a judge for the 2004 Poetry in Public Places Poster Competition. Her poem "Ordinary People" broke from the rituals of the mundane into exuberance. Likewise, the poems in Radiance spotlight "blue and black graffiti shining in the rain's/bright gaze." They wear an "evening's melancholy shawls." They exhale "the glories/of breath."
The book moves deftly between struggle and song. A "congregation of grackles" is "a long black scarf unwinding/in the cold west wind"; "Even dandelions glitter/in the lawn, a handful of golden change." Crooker sees life as "a pile of sorrows, yes, but joy/enough to unbalance the equation." In her aptly titled poem "Sometimes I Am Startled Out of Myself," the geese "stitch up the sky, and it is whole again."
In Radiance, we feel the pain-wrought stitches-a son with autism; an ailing parent; a friend dying of cancer; a first child, who "was born, then died, on her due date"; a hectic life that ironically leaves no time to fix a broken clock. Through Crooker's words, nature and art work together to make us whole, even if the mending is temporary. Through the masterpieces of Monet, Renoir, Van Gogh, Cezanne, and Manet, we see "a blizzard of color and light." The "black flag/of pain" becomes "white/ lilacs in a crystal vase." The healing is artistic, physical, and spiritual.
Although "the sky winds its own long note, a radiant heartache blue," as Crooker explains, she and her husband sing "loudly as we can, in our tone deaf voices/against the coming rain, the following dark." As readers, we want to take up the song. Maybe if we do, "the suffering world" will indeed "[recede] in the background." Radiance is half Blues, half Spiritual-contagious with hope. Just try not to join in.
Review:
Radiance , 2005
Review of Radiance, Poems by Barbara Crooker
Published by Word Press, ©2005
ISBN: 1932339914
by BG Thurston, Easton Irregular
NEVER ENOUGH RADIANCE
In a troubled time when much of the poetry that finds its way into journals and anthologies seems either self-absorbed or esoteric, the lament seems true that contemporary poetry has forgotten the mainstream audience. But there are notable exceptions, and Barbara Crooker’s poems embody that rare spark of connection people seek when they pull a volume of poetry off the bookshelf.
Winner of the Word Press First Book Prize, Barbara Crooker’s full-length collection of poems was released earlier this year. It is a beautiful book, both inside and out with a fall painting by Hudson River School artist Thomas Worthington Whittredge gracing its cover. Many of the poems contain fall images and indeed the volume represents a speaker contemplating the autumnal period of her life—along with its sobering realization of how short our time on this earth truly is. But what lifts and distinguishes this collection is Crooker’s imaginative and intricate weaving of art, humor, praise and passion that serves to buffer the inevitable sorrows and disappointments that complicate every ordinary life.
Crooker’s poems turn our attention to the hidden ecstasies of the everyday – they help us to become “awake.” We see life from a kaleidoscope of different perspectives. Whole worlds bloom inside paintings created by the French impressionists. We are buoyed by the revelation in “Iris, 1889/Vincent Van Gogh:” “The wild blue heart of longing moves up, up, from papery rhizomes, common dirt…It’s all or nothing, this loud shout...They lean to the left, pushed by the wind, but not one stalk is bent or broken.”
We witness the unfolding presence of the natural world – “small intersections, our only miracles” that occur when confronted by a black bear, the diminishing specter of a dead opossum, or the quiet sounds of deer chewing fallen apples. Crooker’s stunning poem involving a woman and a hawk invites us inside its many metaphorical amplifications:
The Woman Who Called Hawks from the Sky
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.
In October, he floats on the thermals,
halfway between the flamboyant sky
and the gaudy dance of sugar maple, oak leaf, birch.
When the apples ripen, heavy and red, when gravity
begins to call them down, I hear him high above the clouds
crying, “killer, killer, killer.”
In winter, when water in the birdbath turns to stone,
he comes down in a rush of mottled feathers flame stitched
brown and white, all hooks and curves, talons, beak.
I come to the back door, with my bowl of blood,
chicken scraps, congealed fat, gristle, skin,
leave it as an offering.
When nothing in my life seems predictable or constant,
down he comes, a whistle on the wind, conjured
out of nothing, the great grey ceiling, the thin, thin air.
The speaker also takes us into the unusual realm she shares with her autistic son: “What does he see in his world, where geometry is more beautiful than a human face?…He loves things that are perforated: toilet paper, graham crackers, coupons in magazines, loves the order of the tiny holes…” We consider the world from his perspective when he asks: “What time is 12 o’clock midnight? When is it Saturday? Where is Hurricane Floyd? Will you marry me all the time?”
Poems that claim or celebrate the middle-aging body remind us that the rediscovery of passion is possible between “Two stubborn people, dulled into habit, stuck in the old sock of marriage” who “might just fall in love again.” The poem “In the Middle” instructs us that: “Each day, we must learn again how to love, between morning’s quick coffee and evening’s slow return.” Time spent in Provence and Paris provide heaven-on-earth respite and the memory of desire that the speaker keeps inside her heart: “This is what I’d bring back: shadows of stones, twilight longings, a handful of crushed lilacs from the bar at the Closerie…Just a condensation of blue, distilled in a small glass bottle with a stopper…musk of the centuries, the gathering dusk, a hedge against the night, the world that will end.”
“In Provence” Vincent Van Gogh notes: “There is no blue without yellow,” and it’s a fact that our lives also contain “the radiance of hunger and the radiance of heartache.” Certainly, there are sorrows that counter the ecstatic moments in Crooker’s poems. When the speaker’s autistic son repeats his “questions without answers ad infinitum in an endless loop,” she recalls Monet saying “’Each day, I discover things I didn’t see before,’ but I lie here wondering how I can get through another day of this.”
There are also poems that teeter on despair over the evanescent world, such as “Praise Song,” which begins with jubilant gratitude for “the light of late November” yet concludes with the stark declaration” “Though darkness gathers, praise our crazy fallen world; it’s all we have, and it’s never enough.” But that bleak pronouncement is offset by the celebration of the present moment of “this ordinary summer afternoon” in the poem “Happiness” which ends: “Sometimes, just what you have manages to be enough.”
Radiance is a book that I found myself recommending several times this past week – to a woman at a writing conference who confided over lunch about her two-year old autistic daughter. And again to a couple of students who told me they just didn’t “get” poetry anymore, that none of it had relevance for them. Barbara Crooker’s poetry invites us back inside, widening our view of our own lives and reminding us how to love this transient, vanishing yet still radiant world.
Review:
Radiance (Word Press) , 2005
Reviewing Radiance
Shirley S. Stevens, Time of Singing
Ezra Pound suggests that an image is a fusion or collage. He says the
giver of the image (the painter, the visual artist) and the receiver of the
image (the writer) bond in a shared dialogue.
Barbara Crooker, in her collection Radiance, winner of the Word Press
First Book Prize, participates in this shared dialogue between visual and verbal artist.
In the next to last poem in her collection "Poem Ending with a Line by
Rumi," she invites us to "kneel and kiss the ground":
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.
Barbara shows us color in scarlet wildflowers and cobalt dotted
butterflies. Her palette in "Poem for My Birthday" includes many colors ranging from
light of amber, plum clouded sunsets,
the remaining leaves somber, russets and umber,
the last bits of color before winter’s muslin
dropcloths are laid down.
She refers to Edouard Manet in her epigraph to her poem "All There Is to Say." Manet said that a painter can say all that he wants to with fruit. She proceeds to paint her own verbal picture of a vegetable:
Unlike other
still lifes, these onions are living: green shoots burst
out their tops, electric, wired, a green dance
of new growth. Green flames singing in the hearth,
Green fingers shooting for the sun. What else
could he want to say, except that every thing
on this small blue ball is alive....
Barbara Crooker, an artist, doesn't paint still lifes. Her poetry is in
motion, alive with color, images, and insight.
When she writes "Sunflowers," she describes Van Gogh's wheat fields
so that the reader visualizes the painting:
The sky scratched with crows, their dark raucous chatter....
his cypresses, their black flames, his bruise-blue
irises that wince against the yellow wall, the vase
of sunflowers, those molten golds, the fierceness
of their burning.
I will never again look at a Van Gogh painting in the same way.
She has made me see Vincent’s "bruise-blue irises" as well as "the cobalt intensity behind the yellow house."
Barbara Crooker invites us to join her in viewing life as Van Gogh did
in his letter to his brother when he said, "I am in it with all of my
heart." Barbara is also an integral part of her poems with both her gift
for description and her heart.
In the title poem to Radiance, Barbara reminds us:
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.
