Reviews & Interviews

Review:

Starting from Zero (Great Elm Press) , 1987
Barbara Crooker's is a voice of kitchens and wine, hills and the way black tulips shape a road from home to home. When I read her poems, I smell bread rising, hear children cry out at snow on red leaves, taste sour cherries sharp and lasting as love. She writes of all a woman can make and takes us with her into that power.
--Katharyn Machan Aal, Coordinator, Ithaca Community Poets

Review:

Writing Home , 1983
I truly like the poems in Barbara Crooker's Homecoming [her half of Writing Home, co-written with Katharyn Machan Aal] because of the way they attempt to get through to a power flowing beneath, through, and over things, power of ice, of the roots of jonquils and tulips. And of light, certainly light, because that mostly is what touches these poems, shapes them, gives them, as Jacob Bronowski once said, "the information that binds us." But if there is that, there are also hints of the darkness behind the light. In "Drought," the speaker says, "Even the moon is red,/and each morning,/the grinning sun/begins again/to bleed us." And this from a poem called "Spontaneous Combustion" which looks at the end of a season: "the hills drift over,/the light that was given/returns to the source." These poems carefully and wonderfully look at the little things in those hills and in so doing, cause one to think of William Blakes lines: "To see the world in a grand of sand/And heaven in a wild flower."
--Harry Humes