Reviews & Interviews

Review:

Obbligato , 1990
Alive, sensuous, Barbara Crooker's poems have eloquent things to say about the contrary world we inhabit, its rich outpouring of pleasures and disappointments, aburdities and waste, the frenzy of its color and tastes. Largely tuned to the nourishing presence of family in country places, the poet deftly plays out the contradictions of contemporary ife, and has foiund a musical language that perfectly serves her intensity of feeling, and her swift turns of wit.
--Colette Inez

Review:

Obbligato , 1990
My first measure of a new book of poems is readability. Does it hold my attention, keep me turning the pages, keep surprising me with new insights? Obbligato certainly does. Morever, it cheers me with the enthusaism, realism, and humor of a woman in love with life, even when it takes the form of bunnies eating her garden, or a sixteen-year-old carhop who sees the moon above her like a cheeseburger on a black plate or a Vietnamese refugee wasting away in a strange land. Each page illuminates the familiar experiences of domestic life in a fresh light.
--Judson Jerome

Review:

Starting from Zero , 1988
In this brief collection of poems, Barbara Crooker (DC '67) celebrates the daily realities of a life close to the land. She writes of food and flowers, of the "patched grain quilt" of the landscape and the "long hard winters and brief sweet springs" along New York State's Southern Tier. The flavor of her verse can be sampled in this excerpt from "10th Anniversary," recalling the June morning when a pair of new lovers go strawberry picking and, returning home,
turn the fresh fruit into preserves:
hull and cull the berries, crush them
with lemon, boil until thick
and sweet with yearning and sun.
Sealed in wax, each jar's stainded glass,
full of the light.
--Rutgers Alumni Magazine