Reviews & Interviews
Review:
, 2005
Main Street Rag
Radiance
By Barbara Crooker
Word Press, Cincinnati, OH
84 pages
Barbara Crooker’s book of poetry, Radiance, is the winner of the Word Press First Book Prize and every poem included is, indeed, a winner. Crooker is a poet after my own heart—her love of language is obvious in her precise selection of each word; her passion for this life is palpable and she refuses to turn away from its ugly underside, thereby saving her poems from any taint of sappiness. Instead, these poems ring with authentic, hard-earned joy.
Crooker has been published in numerous literary journals, including these pages. Her work has been nominated seventeen times for a Pushcart Prize and she has received numerous prizes including the W.B.Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts’ Creative Writing Fellowships and a prize from the NEA. She is the author of ten chapbooks.
Let me begin with the look of the book, which is lovely. The painting, Kaaterskill Falls, by Thomas Worthington Whittridge, graces the cover and sets the mood for the poems inside. When I first saw the book, I couldn’t wait to begin reading—I wanted to walk into that light.
This collection is divided into six parts with no more than ten poems per part. Crooker’s subjects include art, impressionism, the natural world, France, the problems and pleasures of long, married love, and autism. In “All That Is Glorious Around Us,” (the title of an exhibit on The Hudson River School) Crooker declares “All that is glorious around us is not, for me, these grand vistas, sublime peaks…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.”
It is the common small pleasure that catches Crooker’s grateful eye, things such as “sitting in a café warmed by steam from white chicken chili,” or even “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.”
In “The Irrational Numbers of Longing, The Infinite Mathematics of Desire,” Crooker turns her attention to love. “I want to relearn the language of plane geometry,/the relationship of curves in space, the friction/between positive and negative numbers, improper/fractions, your lovely smooth surface, the angle/of intersection, where we come together in the dark.” The ‘relearning’ is what interests me most, knowing the ease with which long-term lovers can lose each other. Crooker approaches this dilemma several times throughout this collection. “Each day we must learn/ again how to love, between morning’s quick coffee/and evening’s slow return.”
From married love to maternal love, Crooker also writes a couple very taut poems about her autistic son. Through brief glimpses into that strange world, we learn just a little about this mystifying condition.
"Sometimes, he stares through the mesh on a screen.
He loves things that are perforated:
toilet paper, graham crackers, coupons
in magazines, loves the order of the tiny holes,
the way the boundaries are defined. And real life
is messy and vague. He shrinks back to a stare,
switches off his hearing. And my heart,
not cleanly cut like a valentine, but irregular
and many-chambered, expands and contracts,
contracts and expands. "
Though hard-pressed to select a favorite poem among these gems, “Happiness” would be one of my choices. Listen to the final lines:
"This is all there is: the red cherries, the green leaves
sky like a pale silk dress, and the rise and fall
of the sweet breeze. Sometimes, just what you have
manages to be enough."
How can one be alive and not fall in love with such a poet?
--Anne Barnhill
Review:
work in general , 2005
Barbara Crooker writes on a varietyof subjects, often returning to the theme of the sacred as it pervades the quotidian aspects of human experience. As one critic has noted, her poems "glow with awareness of the transformative power of the extraordinary at the heart of life." In these poems, daily tasks, such as preparing meals, caring for children, and doing laundry, become a means of access for both poet and reader into the realm of mystery. Ordinary acts become sacraments, visible signs of the divine, unseen life in which we participate. Crooker's poems have been praised for their "courage and clarity," and for the way "each one concludes with an insight that opens into wonder." Even as she contemplates the darker aspects of experience--the death of an infant, the dificulty of communicating with a disabled child, the illness of an aged parent--these poems offer the reader and listener glimpses, at every turn, of the blessings of living an incarnate life. In language that is musical, fresh, and nuanced, she communicates to us a vision that is sober and joyful, foolish and wise, human and finally, holy.
--Angela O'Donnell
Interview:
Lafayette Marquis , 2005
1) When did you begin writing poetry and why?
I think I've always written- - I was one of those children who wrote and illustrated stories in a notebook, the sort of experience that seems to be common among the interviewees in Bill Moyers' program "Fooling Around With Words" that was shown on PBS. I'd call my experience "falling in love with words." I was a big reader; my parents were always sending me outside to "get some fresh air," so I'd slip a book under my shirt and climb up the willow tree out front so I could keep on reading. I did then (and still do) love to read the dictionary. On one segment of the show, Robert Pinsky (the former Poet Laureate) told Moyers that he liked to do this, too, and Moyers looked at him like he was from another planet. "Well, Bill," Pinsky said, "it takes all kinds, right?" When I was in high school, I wrote for and was the editor of the school newspaper, and I majored in English as an undergraduate, where I took a creative writing class. I didn't actually attend it, little snot that I was, just handed in the assignments via a friend. So I didn't get started until I was in my late 20's, with a small child, going through a divorce. Part of this was because although I'd taken courses like "Contemporary American Literature," I was pretty much unaware of what LIVING contemporary writers were up to. My ex had left some of his books behind, including a copy of "The Eagle," a little magazine from Mansfield State College in northern Pennsylvania. I read it, and was blown away by some of the poetry, especially that of Diane Wakoski, who I thought in my ignorance was an undergraduate. Perhaps if I'd realized she was a famous writer, I'd have been intimidated, but I read her work and the accompanying interview over and over, and tried to figure out how she got from point A to point B. So my first adult work was based on hers, although if you saw the early poems side by side with Diane's, you'd be hard pressed to see the connection. But for me, it's definitely there. It's still pretty much one of the ways I work- - I read a lot, and if something strikes a chord, I try to see how I can incorporate that technique into my own poems. Right now, I'm fascinated with "the turn," how poems that start out in one direction have a subtle change that transforms the poem so that it ends up in another direction altogether.
2) Who or what, or even when, is/was your most powerful inspiration, and why?
I write about everything, so "the world" would be one answer, and "nature" would be another. But I also write a lot about my son with autism. It's such a paradox, having some facility with language and then living with someone for whom language isn't necessary. It's made me more aware of the nonverbal ways in which we communicate, as did living with the failed Seeing-Eye dog we adopted, who became David's best friend. It's also made me attuned to both the power and the limitation of language.
3) How do you handle writer's block?
Because my day to day life is somewhat overwhelming--he's on a gluten and casein-free diet, which means a lot of extra cooking, plus organizing the daily doses of meds, vitamins, and mineral supplements, plus running an in-home behavior program-- I don't have time to have writer's block. . . . Besides, I think part of the "business" of writing is reading, so when I'm not currently working on something, I'm busy catching up on my reading, and then something new starts to bubble up . . . .
4) Is there a special place you go where you are most productive, and why?
I don't have a "room of my own" (Virginia Woolf), just a backpack (so I can move to wherever it's quiet) and a corner of the dining room, so I can work online while waiting for the school van to pick up my son. I'm always working, but the place where I can be the most productive is the one away from home, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA), an artists' colony in Sweet Briar, Virginia. I can do six to nine months work there in ten days (the most I can be away at any one time).
5) With all the issues of war and violence going on in the world today, do you look at poetry as not only a way to express your views and feelings on these issues, but as well, as an escape from the horror our world must go through?
I wouldn't call it an escape from the horror, but rather, a way of processing what is, on the surface, incomprehensible. We (artists in general) write (or paint, sculpt, etc.) to make sense of the senseless. I don't look at writing as a form of self-expression, but rather, the love of the made thing, like a hand-thrown bowl or oil on canvas. I try to do what William Stafford said: "I have woven a parachute out of everything broken."
