Reviews & Interviews

Review:

Ordinary Life , 2002
Ordinary Life is the 2001 winner of ByLine magazine's national competition. Barbara Crooker brings an impressive poetic resume to its pages, with her work appearing in such periodicals as Yankee, The Christian Science Monitor, Negative Capability, and The Denver quarterly,, anthologies, and eight collections. She has also received three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fellowships in Literature and four Pushcart Prize nominations.

It is impossible to select my favorite lines from this finely crafted volume. Poems entitled "Doing Jigsaw Puzzles," "Listening to the Mockingbird," "Blowing Soap Bubbles," and "The Children of the Challenger League Enter Paradise," deal with the "ordinary life" of an autistic child, and the life of the family who loves him.

I first read her work in Welcome Home. Her matter-of-fact attitude and understated emotion haunted me. I hear those chords again in "Pushing the Stone":
The stone
was heavy.
The family carried it
with them
all day.
Not one could bear
its weight, alone.
Yet how they loved it.
No other stone had
its denseness,
its particular way
of bending the light . . . .
The stone became
a part of them,
a bit of granite
in the spine,
a shard of calcite
in the heart.
Sometimes
its weight
pressed them thin,
transparent
as wildflowers
left in the dictionary . . . .

Other work woven throughout, such as "Going to My 25th Reunion," "Running Injured," and "The Evening News" chronicle her life as a separate person, but somehow you feel that the "stone" is always with her, pressing himself to her bosom.

"Show, don't tell," is a high art in these pages, as in "Walking on Back Roads":
I try to let go of my pack of angers,
small jealousies, petty quarrels,
let them float in the wind like milkweed silk,
dandelion clocks, blow off and disperse
as the evening spreads its violet cloak.
But they cling, stubborn as cockleburs,
stinging nettles, beggar's ticks . . . .

I loved this collection and her deft touch with such a deeply felt subject.
--Lora Zill, Time of Singing

Review:

article , 2001
"Taking the Slow Road"

"How long does it take to write a poem?" students ask me. "As long as it takes," is what I usually reply. Why is there a rush? Everyone’s in such a hurry these days; I’ll see work dated 12/15/00, 1:15 am, as though a single moment was all that was needed. Mary Oliver says that writing a poem is an act of “slow and deep listening,” and I couldn’t agree with her more.

Since I save my work sheets, I’m going to go back in time to show a little about the way I work and the way this poem, “A Congregation of Grackles,” came into being. Let me preface this by saying I’m a saver—I clip coupons, have boxes of old baby clothes (even though my youngest child is 17), and am on family photo album #32. So, if in the course of revision, I cut lines (which is usually the case), I save the ones I think might be worth using again someday. I’m tied to the wheel of the year as far as my work habits go, and so I write in the upper left hand corner “winter” “spring” or whatever season the old lines might go with, and put them in my folder.

Last year, in late winter, I “found” these lines there: “Light preens, spreads its feathers, like grackles fanning their wings.” “They clatter in the maple trees, making a/their racket that passes for song.” (This is another thing I do: write down alternate choices using a slash to divide them. I think if you stop to consider which is the best choice, you lose your momentum.) “It’s the season of no return/nothings, winter not done with us, spring yet to arrive.”

I thought, “Whoa, I think I’ve got something here.” This, too, often happens, that the poem or lines I was stuck on a year ago miraculously show me the pattern after some time goes by.

My work comes from observing the natural world. The images in this poem came from walks with my black Lab in the woods behind our house. After I re-read the old lines and did some thinking, I rearranged the order and extended the images:“It’s the season of no return/nothings, winter not done with us, spring yet to arrive. The scruffy dun lawns turn a little greener/have some green now; change comes, but slowly/but lord, it’s slow. Light preens, spreads its feathers, like grackles fanning their wings. They clatter in the maple trees, making a/their racket that passes for song. Stalked, they pour out of the woods, a long black scarf trailing/unwinding in the cold/west/westerly wind.”
Then I went further: “Their raucous talk, like fingernails on glass or a chalkboard, unoiled hinges, rusty gates. They are (the) black stitches on the blue bunting of the sky/quilting the blue sky. X X X X X X X X stands for loss. The unknown of love. Atonal music.”

There’s a lot of rubbish here and some of this doesn’t even make sense. But you need to have the freedom to do this, to wander, meander, to write without that inner censor who says, “What garbage. This isn’t any good.”

Now I could feel something happening, and I started working on it as a poem instead of random scraps of prose, paying attention to line length and music:

CACAPHONY/A CONFLAGRATION OF GRACKLES/A CONGREGATION OF GRACKLES
It is the season of no return, winter not done
with us, spring yet to arrive. (The)scruffy lawns
turn (a little) greener, inch by inch. Change comes, but lord,
it’s slow. The light/Daylight preens, spreads its feathers,
like grackles fanning their wings.
They cluck and clatter in the maple trees,
making a racket that passes for song.
Startled, they pour out of the woods,
a long black scarf unwinding
in the cold west wind.
Their raucous talk, a thousand fingernails scratching on glass
or a chalkboard, shreds the air.
Black cross stitches embroidering/they quilt the blue bunting sky.
They are the X, the unknown quantity
in every equation. They mark the spot
crossing/where the equinox turns/where we cross the equinox,
(these multiplicands of darkness, reminding us),
and the woods resurrect/bloom again, and each/every new day
another gift of light/presents us with the gift of light. (confused ending one)
. . .They mark the spot
where we cross the equinox,
moving from darkness
into the light (ending two)
. . .They mark the spot
where the equinox turns, and we bloom again
in the soft green light. (ending three)

At this point, one of the big things that happened was that the poem grew from mere description into something larger. Part of the process for me was that I didn’t know where I wanted the poem to go. I found the images to work with, and they led me on. The next step for me was reductive: how much could I take out, to strengthen what was there?

The right title surfaced (again, sometimes this happens by leaving it alone, and seeing which one seems right), and the pattern was much clearer. There were 3-4 more versions in between, which actually made this a “quick” poem for me. Here is the final version:

A CONGREGATION OF GRACKLES
It is the season of no return, winter not done
with us, spring yet to arrive. Scruffy lawns
turn a little greener; daylight preens, spreads
its feathers. Grackles fan their wings,
clatter and clack in the maple trees,
making a racket that passes for song.
Startled, they pour out of the woods,
a long black scarf unwinding
in the cold west wind.
Their raucous talk, a thousand fingernails
scratching on glass or a chalkboard,
shreds the air. Black cross stitches,
embroidering the blue bunting sky,
they are the X, the unknown quantity
in every equation. They mark the spot
where we cross the equinox,
the resurrection of the woods,
moving from darkness
into the light.

(published in The Potomac Review, and also on their web site)

How long did this process take? Several years, at least. How long does it take to write each poem? Thirty years, I want to say, the whole length of time I’ve been a writer. I’m still learning. The road still goes on.
--Barbara Crooker, The Upper Case

Review:

Ordinary Life , 2001
These poems . . .glow with awareness of the transformative power of the extraordinary at the heart of life, the 'day of grace/in the dead of winter' [from the title poem, "Ordinary Life"]. It is the courage and clarity of these poems, and the way each one concludes with an insight that opens into wonder, that drew me to this collection.
--Carolyne Wright