Reviews & Interviews

Review:

Omnibus review: Writing Home, Starting From Zero, Looking for the Comet Halley, The Lost Children, Ordinary Life, Obbligato, In the Late Summer Garden, The White Poems , 1998
Work is an integral part of Barbara Crooker's "ordinary life." Straightforward depiction of working in her poetry resembles a Walker Evans photograph or genre painting by Thomas Hart Benton. Work is time-consuming and demands commitment but produces a sense of belonging, even pleasure. By working we feed ourselves and family and gain perspective on the world.

Whether gardening and preparing food, picking fruit and baking, caring for and raising children, dealing with disability and illness, or writing poetry, work isn't idealized. Linked to a long tradition of literature about American farm and rural life, this labor ("what's sure, what's tangible") is based on inner strength and fortitude. It is not woman's work, a domestic task, or burdensome chore. Work entails belief in earth: "I will tturn over the soil, smell dark earth/rise like a river, work in compost and humus."

Work makes communication possible between people, shapes interconnectedness, and complements writing poetry: "I waxed the kitchen/cabinets until they glowed like old honey,/and I wrote a few lines." Work (waxing kitchen cabinets), a natural act (they "glowed like old honey"), is metaphor for creativity. (". . .and I wrote a few lines"). Work and writing poetry together are more than pastimes or escape. Work is "ritual,""a sacrament, this easing of the heart." A reader experiences rhythms of work through the senses: "turn the fresh fruit into preserves:/hull and cull the berries, crush them/with lemon, boil until thick/and sweet with yearning and sun." Simple language ("hull and cull the berries") embodies a process of working with one's hands as berries contain "yearning and sun."

There's quiet, almost silent, resonance to "ordinary" in "ordinary life." An ordered world is made up of many rhythms of "the entire vegetable world running to fruit." Crooker's poetry advances by steadfast, homespun accumulation of sensious imagery, by exploration of human and organic relationships in a rural Pennsylvania landscape. Like work, which gives permanence to "this transient world," poetry that "burns" to be written produces a sense of belonging. In "Looking for Loons," she says, "This poem, in spite of itself, burns to be written,/surfaces like the ripples our paddles make as they dip in the water,/spreading in circles and growing." Poetic rhythms ("This poem") take the form of natural rhythms (ripples "spread in cirecles and growing."). We integrate ourselves to seasonal change, and, in turn, it encourages an expressive sense of self: "Our mouths begin to speak in flowers."

"Everything gathers," Crooker argues. Bonds hold families together and define family members as individals and members of a stable community. There is no loneliness or neurosis, no gulf between internal and external reality, and, in the end, one is enabled and tested by love and an unfolding recognition of what we owe each other. "Rosa Multiflora," a poem about "brambles and extravagant/blooms" of wild roses, concludes: "This is the season/of transformation, when something unasked for/can turn into love. Strength inherent in seasons ("brambles and extravagant/blooms") ensures continuity and engagement ("something unasked for") with human activity. Constraint is a kind of freedom.

Apples, cherries, raspberries, and eggplant (each has a poem written about it) have unadorned beauty that joins aesthetic and sensuous qualities of their appearance and form with family ritual. Fruit and flower emerge out of nature, as we do, symbolic representation of a larger whole. ("Vegetable Love," a catalogue of "earth's voluptuaries," ends "praise what comes from the earth.") They incorporate and transcend time, give life concrete, localized meaning, and are a focus for family members to come together to have "actual conversation,/"no bickering or pokes." The word "actual," critical to enhancing responsiveness to change, defines these poems. Crooker's not obsessed with literary fancy talk or reckless confessionalism. Actual lived life flows through this language.

The end of "Ordinary Life" focuses on connections between "skin & skeleton" of a roast chicken and stars, finite and infinite:
The chicken's diminished to skin & skeleton,
the moon to a comma, a sliver of white,
but this has been a day of grace
in the dead of winter,
the hard cold knuckle of the year,
a day that unwrapped itself
like an unexpected gift,
and the stars turn on,
order themselves
into the winter night.

"A day of grace," coming at a time of ordeal ("the hard cold knuckle of the year"), is a sense of specialness and support we derive from harvest and food ("an unexpected gift"). More earth-bound than divine, grace leads to spiritual reclamation and links us to a larger harmony of nature, "the stars," which "turn on,/order themselves/into the winter night." As with Whitman, another poet who appreciates rhythm of work, precise details ("golden seed heads/ shining, beautiful unto themselves")disclose "pearled skies full of hope/no matter what else we know." "I want to praise everything brief and finite," she concludes in "Equinox," which could be a line from Song of Myself.

Her work reaches out to comprehend how order and disorder are related. On one level life is "tangled" and means struggle and profound loss, but on a deeper level health and deterioration, life and death, are part of the same continuum. Although disorder is "messy" and sad, it isn't inexplicable or malevolent. It is an inevitable part of seasonal cycles. "Quiscalus Quiscula,"describing "inexplicable mystery" of the song of grackles, concludes: "The purpose/for their darkness is to fly against the dogwoods,/remind us that night is always bearing down." Not only allegorical "night" suggests death "is always bearing down." "In the Late Summer Garden" is elegiac tribute to a friend whose cancer "has grown, spread to her femur/and liver." Ominious hints of "unspeakable words" arise in The Lost Children, and the poems of Ordinary life describe her son's autism with endurance and loving forthrightness. ("An invisible icy membrane/is cast over him like a caul.") Confronting the challenge of these difficulties, Crooker not only shows calmness but remarkable intellectual courage in refusing to give into disappointment or self-pity at "the last gasp of light." Although her heart "burns & burns," her conclusion is affirmative: "There is no point in denying the body's hunger."

Although The White Poems returns to previous motifs (birds, gardening, seasonal change), these poems provide a stress test of mortality to bonding of family and friends. Documenting "long suffering," this poetry, a journal of conscience, describes a friend's cancer of the breast and back. As the friend endures a mastectomy, bone marrow transplant, chemotherapy, reoccurence of cancer, and death, Crooker's loyalty never flinches as she walks every step of the way with her friend. At the end she finds "consolation" in the friend's "fierce will and stubbornness." "Letter to Judy," the final poem, depicts a chastened spring landscape:

If I could call you, I'd say that daffodils
are blooming by the forsythia,a thicket of sparks,
that the world has turned green and gold.
Three years ago when we heard the diagnosis,
I knew what metastatic meant, that we would not
grow old together. The woods are still brown
and bare, the Little Jordan running cold and clear,
and colt's foot, the first flowers, rise up
through the oak leaves, bright burning suns.

Like the Little Jordan "running cold and clear," words are reduced to bare bones of hopeful grieving. Brutality and pain of the ugly, difficult word, "metastic," embraced by a flow of earthy Old and Middle English words ("woods are brown and bare"), has been relieved. Language promotes healing. Passed into "the first/flowers," the lost friend has been transformed into "bright burning suns." Annealed by suffering, made lucid by empathy, this "book of years" explores dimensions of human and seasonal transformation. Testimony to life-span development, Crooker's "ordinary life" is interpenetrated by caring, love of family and work, and, despite disease and death, a surge of life: "everything is diffused in light."
--Frank Allen

Review:

In the Late Summer Garden , 1998
When Barbara Crooker tells us "she smells the sun's/hot breath," we believe her, for this is a poet who knows that poetry begins with the senses and who is intensely aware of them. But she also knows that the things of the world precede the senses, and we delight to watch her "Feel a tomato, heft its weight in your palm,/think of buttocks, breasts, this plump pulp," always bringing us three-dimensionally, solidity. And as a poet who incorporates with feeling the rich fullness of experience, she also reaches forward and back, to longing and to memory, the reawakening of love or the recapturing of glistening moments both in France and in the blessed privacy of a writers' colony. Her framing of this new book is particularly lovely, opening with the death of an opossum and ending with the celebration of a much-disdained bird, the grackle--a holy surprise.
--Karl Patten

Review:

In the Late Summer Garden , 1998
Barbara Crooker breathes new life into an old metaphor, confronting the transiency of our days where "night is always bearing down" to find the fleeting but redemptive core of our existence. Whether she traces the cycles of wild nature near her Pennsylvania home or meditates on human desire while strolling the gardens of Giverny, Crooker's poems are tanglible, descriptive, sensuous, and wise. This is a wonderful collection.
--Walt Franklin