~DIANE LOCKWARD~
BARBARA
CROOKER: RADIANCE
Crooker has an
extraordinary ear for the sounds
of words. The reader’s
ear leaps up in delight
at the alliteration,
assonance, consonance,
and
near rhymes . . .
While Radiance
is Barbara Crooker’s first full-length book, it is clearly the work of
a seasoned poet who has done the hard work of mastering her craft.
Crooker writes in free verse that proves T. S. Eliot’s contention that vers libre is not free at all to
the poet “who wants to do a good job.” This poet knows how to make
poetry sing. And she knows how to arrange individual poems into a
single work of art as unified and stunning as the painting that graces
the cover of her book.
Crooker skillfully divides her fifty poems into six
sections. In each of the first four sections, a season of the year
serves as a subtle backdrop to the various themes which dance their way
throughout the book. This structure creates an underlying tension
between background and foreground; as the seasons, beginning with fall,
move chronologically forward, the poet creates a counter-movement by
shifting back and forth in time. The last two sections focus on the
seasons of a woman’s life. Here, too, the poet moves back and forth
between the past and present, mixing poems about adolescence with
others about marriage, motherhood, and menopause. The collection gains
an additional layer of complexity with the ongoing alternation between
darkness and light, grief and joy.
Time functions not only as part of the structural
plan but also as theme. Crooker keeps us constantly aware of the
presence of Time. In “Quiscalus Quiscula” the speaker, observing
grackles, asks, “Is the purpose for their darkness to fly against / the
dogwoods, remind us that night is always / bearing down? Time beats its
blueblack wings. . . .” A number of poems look backward to more
carefree days of innocence. In “The Fifties” “Time was a jarful of
pennies” as the speaker and her young friends cut out paper dolls. In
“Junior High, Home Economics” these girls “couldn’t imagine a future
that didn’t fit / the pattern, thought there was nothing / [they]
couldn’t alter, darn, or patch, / somehow make right.” Interspersed
among such poems are those in which the mature speaker confronts the
hard times adulthood brings — the death of a daughter at birth, a son
with autism, an aging and ailing mother. By strategically staggering
the poems, the poet wisely sacrifices narrative development and gains
dramatic irony. To the poems of innocence, the reader brings a
knowledge the young speaker did not have: the mature speaker will
experience childbirth and come to know that children are sometimes as
fragile as those paper dolls she once played with.
As Crooker plays past and present off each other,
she also moves back and forth between two worlds. There’s the world of
home with its domestic concerns of cooking, cleaning, raising children,
loving her husband. While this is clearly a place of much joy, it is
also a place of grief and restrictions. “Autism Poem: The Grid”
grippingly uses the son’s fascination with grids as an emblem for the
restrictions of the speaker’s life:
A
black and yellow spider hangs motionless in its web,
and my son,
who is eleven and doesn’t talk, sits
on a patch of
grass by the perennial border, watching.
What does he
see in his world, where geometry
is more
beautiful than a human face?
Given chalk,
he draws shapes on the driveway:
pentagons,
hexagons, rectangles, squares.
The spider’s
web is a grid,
transecting
the garden in equal parts.
Juxtaposed to this world is the outside
one — Virginia, with its Blue Ridge Mountains, and beyond that, Paris
with its history, its art, its cuisine. In “Impressionism” the speaker
longs for this other world as she finds herself at “the end of a
difficult year, / horror after horror on the news, my mother’s life /
decreasing breath by suffering breath. Too much death / for anyone to
take in, and what comes next? The borders / of the world constrict,
tighten. France now seems / like an impossible dream, as far away as
the stars.” But she does periodically escape to Paris. Asked by a
friend, in “Nocturne in Blue,” to bring back a stone, the speaker
thinks of all she’d bring back if only she could:
twilight longings, a handful of crushed lilacs
from the bar
at the Closerie, some lavender de Provence,
Odilon Redon’s
chalky mauves, a jazz piano playing the blues,
Mood Indigo; just a condensation of
blue,
distilled in a
small glass bottle with a stopper,
as if it came
from an expensive parfumerie,
musk of the
centuries, the gathering dusk,
a hedge
against night, the world that will end.
Backed against each other, both worlds
are clarified and intensified. This is not a simple division between
one world good and the other bad. Both contain a landscape and people
the speaker loves. In poem after poem, Crooker includes the physical
terrain’s birds — grackles, geese, cardinals, hawks — and its flowers —
daffodils, forsythia, lilacs, peonies. Wherever she is, she is acutely
alert to and hungry for the beauty the earth yields: its “green grass,
blue hills, yellow fields of mustard,” its “copper-colored woods,” “a
wheat field / turning ochre and amber, every awn and arista shouting
sun! / sun! sun!,” “evening’s violet cashmere,” and November’s “plum
clouded sunsets.”
Other poems ache for the landscape of the body. In
“Away in Virginia, I See a Mustard Field and Think of You,” the speaker
misses her husband who is back home:
the blue hills
are like the shoulders and slopes
of your back
as you sleep. Often, I slip a hand under
your body to
anchor myself to this earth.
I
think of us driving narrow roads in France, under
a tunnel of
sycamores, my hair blowing in the hot wind,
opera washing
out of the radio, loud. We are feeding
each other
cherries from a white paper sack.
.………
I miss your
underwear, soft from a thousand
washings, the
socks you still wear from a store
out of
business thirty years. I love to smell your sweat
after mowing
grass or hauling wood; I miss the weight
on your side
of the bed.
Crooker also harbors a deep love for
language. The reader gets the impression that this poet is always
listening, keenly aware of the poetic potential of words. This
reverence for language takes on ironic poignancy when we recall the
son’s difficulties with language. One notable technique is the folding
in of others’ words. In “The Gyre” we hear from Monet who wrote, “These
landscapes of water / and reflections have become an obsession for me.”
Then we hear from the “compulsive son” who “asks questions without
answers / ad infinitum in an endless loop: ‘What time is 12 o’clock /
midnight? When is it Saturday? Where is Hurricane / Floyd? Will you
marry me all the time?’” In “Stand Up, Stand Up,” one of the
collection’s strongest poems, words from radio sermons are interspersed
with the speaker’s thoughts as she drives through the Blue Ridge
Mountains:
I believe in miracles; I’m a miracle
myself.
On either side
of the Interstate (I want to find,
find the road
that leads to Heaven’s door),
newly green fields, brown & white
cows, the long
stretch of the Blue Ridge, and solid yellow fields
of mustard bright shining as the sun. And all
along the highway,
more and more
redbuds, as if God’s hand had scribbled in fuchsia
along the
brown bark, a loud shout of gladness, joy in my rocky,
rocky heart.
“Books Reviewed in The New York Times, Sunday, June 9,
2002,” is built out of a series of book titles. How appropriate, the
reader thinks, for a poem about a girlhood spent in libraries, how
clever and charming. Then Crooker delivers her power punch: “Years
later, my first child / was born, then died, on her due date. Books
were my salvation. / Nothing Remains
the Same. Walk Through Darkness.”
Another of Crooker’s many gifts is her facility with
figurative language. Although metaphors and similes are the staples of
poetry, Crooker’s consistently surprise and delight. We have “Two
stubborn people . . . stuck in the old sock of marriage,” a “sky like a
pale silk dress,” air “soft / as a well-washed shirt on your arms,” a
grackle’s eyes that “glint like the clasp of a satin purse,” “evening’s
melancholy shawl,” the world “reduced to a black flag / of pain,” and a
“wild blue heart of longing.” “Vegetable Love,” a praise poem written
in language as lush as the garden it describes, comes alive with its
figures. Carrots become “gold mined from the earth’s tight purse,”
zucchini are “green torpedoes,” beets are “the dark blood of the
earth,” and peas rest “in their delicate slippers, / little green
boats, a string of beads.” Personification infuses additional life into
this garden. Basil is “nuzzled / by fumbling bees drunk on the sun,”
while leaves are busy “passing secrets and gossip, making
assignations.” All are “earth’s voluptuaries.”
Crooker is a poet who pays careful attention to
diction, who agrees with Twain that the “difference between any word
and the right word is the difference between the lightning bug and the
lightning.” Always searching for the best words, never settling for the
easy ones, she gives us words like “musical olio,” “atavistic shiver,”
“equinox,” “rhizomes,” “Fauvism / of spring,” “amplitude of flesh,” and
“plum duff.” She sprinkles her collection with French words: “petit déjeuner,” “fin de
siècle,” “crêpe de Chine,” “vin rouge.” And into
the midst of such music, she adds the vocabulary of autism:
“hyperlexic,” “echolalic,” “flicks,” and “stims.”
Crooker has an extraordinary ear for the sounds of
words. The reader’s ear leaps up in delight at the alliteration,
assonance, consonance, and near rhymes in lines such as these from
“Possibly”:
When I left Pennsylvania, spring was still scuffing her feet,
scarf muffled
around her neck, duffle coat buttoned up tight,
the ground
still hard as a calculus textbook, grass infinite
shades of dun
and tan, the scruffy pelt of something dead
by the road,
trees and branches bare.
And what foot could resist tapping out
these lines from “A Woman Is Pegging Wash on the Line”: “She is bending
over the willow basket, / pegging up
sock sock undershirt / sock sock boxers / sock sock bra. / She knows
the use of the singing line / sure as any fly fisher.” And so, too,
does this poet.
Reading this collection, the reader is again and
again struck by its abundance, its hard-won joy. While acknowledging
life’s uncertainty, fragility, and limitations, Crooker writes with an
eye sensitive to the beauty in her two worlds and an ear attuned to the
joyful noises of language. Perhaps the first poem in the book, “All
That Is Glorious Around Us,” should have the last word here:
. . .
everything glorious is around
us already:
black and blue graffiti shining in the rain’s
bright glaze,
the small rainbows of oil on the pavement,
where the last
car to park has left its mark on the glistening
street, this
radiant world.
Crooker, Barbara. Radiance.
Cincinnati, Ohio: Word Press, 2005. ISBN: 1-932339-91-4 $17.00
© by Diane Lockward
