Reviews & Interviews

Review:

The Lost Children , 1990
There are only eighteen poems in this book, but that is like saying there are only twenty-six letters in the English alphabet or that there are only twelve months in a year. The Lost Children has the sort of completeness that brings to mind the four seasons of a year as they are experienced by the five (or six) human senses. Something is always in flux, and the movement is part of a cycle, but there are moments of relative stillness, moments that may become poems of grief or joy, hope or memory, silence in the snow or apple blossoms in the wind.

Barbara Crooker's poems contain nothing shallow or insubstantial. They have an earthiness that is deeply profound and centered in the idea that there is no separation (or there should be no separation) between the natural world and the human experience of it. This bears repeating, over and over, because somehow we are always forgetting it: we are all part of the earth and it is part of us.
Crooker writes:
THE IRIS WORK IN THE YEAR'S RHYTHM,
tunneling in the cold,
reduced to rhizomes,
wary of thaws and frosts.
Even above ground,
they remain plain:
green fans bending
about their common work.
But for one week, they bloom,
unexpected and flagrant.
And sometimes we awaken
from the dull green stalk of habit
and open our of ourselves,
luminescent in our skins.

One's life on this planet may indeed last longer than a flower's, but in the perspective of the planet's lifetime, a human life is only a little less transient than an iris's. Yet both have points on the span of their lives that reveal the sheer wonders usually hidden within. That's only one small lesson we might learn from a flower growing with the rhythm of a year. Other lessons might be the importance of the persistence of memory, how dormancy is essential to fruition, how the past develops and dies into the present, how the present is born and dies into the future, how the rhythms of time flow through a grandmother, a son, the self, and others. From "The Lost Children":
The lost children come to us at night
and whisper in the shells of our ears.
They are waving goodbye on schoolbuses,
separated from us in stadiums,
lost in shopping malls;
at the beach they disappear
behind the first wave.

Perhaps it is too unsettling to rmembember, and so we are always forgetting, that each of us is also a lost child, that the lost children might also be the series of past selves that have become the self we are now. As the now transforms, we transform. The poems in this book move through the seasons and show how seasons move through us, how the cycle is renewed. They show how any quotidian moment in an ordinary life can be a kind of sacramental recognition of being. From "Nothing Is Given, Everything Burns":
. . .quilts settle their bodies
like landscapes.
All my loves
are gathered
under one roof,
and yet I am
unable to sleep . . . .

The body you inhabit, others' bodies, the body of the earth--these are physical landscapes that hold much more than we can see in passing. The Lost Children invites you to be awake to what is there but is usually overlooked. And when you begin any exploration, you never know what you might discover. There are many things to discover in Barbara Crooker's poems.
--Steve Styers, West Branch

Review:

Obbligato , 1990
Barbara Crooker's chapbook, Obbligato is cause for rejoicing. She uses her voice like an instrument creating evocative music, elegaic, celebratory. A fine crafter, Crooker uses rich auditory images to explore events that are significant not only to her but to her readers, and they are delivered in a poetic diction and technique that is accessible and unaffected. Her poems create haunting images that cut close to the bone, a wide range of human experiences and an exquisite regard for language. With a clear and unflinching eye, she reveals deep insight and unsentimental compassion and understanding of how human beings behave. Her diction is straightforward with a careful attention to details, especially in her imagery. Her images flow naturally as they are demanded by the poem. They are not overdone nor are they used simply for their own sakes. She is a remarkably connected poet, and her work often arises from these connections to the past which, sooner or later, we all sense in our own lives but which are here examined, expanded, illuminated. The book's title, "Obbligato," points the way for our reading and keeps our attention focused. Barbara Crooker's unique voice extends and deepens whatever subject she is compelled to write about, and there is a healthy coming to terms with what was and what is:
These ripened days,
honey and wine in the air. . . .
Oh, they're done all right--
nut-brown, fig-tight, lazy with hawks . . . .
How can we cork this amber,
this claret, this port?
We press oak leaves in wax,
dry thistle, simmer apples
all day in copper pots,
but it is not enough,
it is never enough,
for the bone hard night coming on . . . .
--Ruth Daigon

Review:

Obbligato , 1990
Barbara Crooker's poems have been written with a deft touch and with that affection for their textures and pacings that we're accustomed to call, a little dryly, "technical skill." It's a form of love, actually, and since she's expended it on her poems, we can, too.
--William Matthews