Reviews & Interviews

Review:

Starting from Zero , 1987
Barbara Crooker doesn't just report on life, she recreates it, in all its sensual fullness and emotional complexity. Home is the setting for these poems and her strong contralto voice is the medium carrying forward the dramas--both large and small--that inform the poet's life. There is a metaphorical rivhness here and a wealth of sensory detail. This poetry "listens" to the world around it, even as it speaks of it, it is full of breath and passion and the active "stuff" of life. Home becomes in Barbara Crooker's work not a circumscribed locale but the open stage upon which the forces that shape our lives engage to make the poet and us more fully human.
--Brigit Pegeen Kelly

Review:

Starting from Zero , 1987
In Starting from Zero, Barbara Crooker makes and helps her reader to make a tangible world out there, but it's a world loaded with magic--preserving stars instead of peaches, exhibiting finely-wrought poems at the county fair. There comes a point in her poems at which you sit up straighter, alert, because you've suddenly realized that she is making our ordinary world extraordinary, different from what we thought it was--magical. Her gift is for transforming, and that is what poetry is all about, allowing us to see the old world as new.
--Karl Patten

Review:

Looking for the Comet Halley , 1987
When I consider Barbara Crooker's poetry, the word "domestic" comes to mind. Her art reflects the home in that expanded sense where the familiar world is ever canopied by something huge, mysterious. The title poem suggests that even if connections with the natural world are cut, and if our souls are lonely and tumultuous, we need but glance up to make a glorious discover in the lost patterns and unreadable constellations.

In phrases both colloquial and musical, these pieces speak to us with easily recognized terms. "Matchbox Cars" transports us into poignant contemplation of our ways while sitting under nature's canopy. "Persistence" is another fine example of the use of specificity and contrast. Finally, these poems speak for the author's geographical region. Whether Barbara Crooker writes of an Amish girl or our dubious love affair with shopping malls, we sense her love for the land and its traditions. Subtly we take warning for our exploitations. More importantly, we're shown a clear alternative.
--Walt Franklin