Barbara Crooker: Selected Poems

by Barbara Crooker

This collection brings together 102 poems from Barbara Crooker’s previous ten chapbooks of poetry, two of which won national prizes, with a handful of uncollected poems at the end. Of Crooker’s work, William Matthews has written, “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.” Janet McCann, writing in the Foreword, says, “The poems in this collection come mostly from chapbooks, collections which cluster around a theme, such as loss of a parent or friend, raising a child with autism, travel, art. Crooker’s collections are remarkable for their unity; their poems, epigraphs, even covers have a thematic thrust that collects and directs the work, making each a coherent work of art.... Reading the work from beginning to end provides an experience of Crooker’s world, that place of work and sadness balanced by art and love. It also provides vignettes of growing up in the fifties and sixties and shows what it was like to come of age as a woman in those years—the expectations, the hopes, the barriers that had to be overcome. Even in poems of loss, the energy persists, giving us the sense that Crooker is truly in the current of life, feeling its verve—what Wallace Stevens called ‘the intensity of love’ that he identified with ‘the verve of earth.’”

Genres: Poetry

166 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2015

About the author

Barbara Crooker's books are Radiance, which won the 2005 Word Press First Book competition and was a finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize; Line Dance, (Word Press 2008), which won the 2009 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence; and More (C & R Press, 2010). "

Reviews

[Melody Schwarting · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Crooker's Book of Kells poems and these are lovely too, though the subject matter is different. In some ways, it felt like a diary, as Crooker wrote poems about events in her life and community and referred to them along the way. The poems were chosen so that I could follow what was going on. A particularly poignant cycle was from "The White Poems," which were about her friend's suffering and death from cancer.

Crooker writes about nature so well: "April slips on her green silk dress, a soft lilac shawl across her arms, and dances to the small fine music of the rain." (147) She explores grief and parenting and receives all the laurels from me for writing the only non-cringy poem I've ever read about breasts. It can be done!

Crooker mostly writes in excellent free verse, but there is a sonnet crown, a villanelle, and a few other forms here and there. Poems to enjoy in all seasons, poems to learn by.

"The Rose Villanelle" (39)
Everywhere I've lived I've planted roses
And though we've moved a lot, the roses stay.
Who knows what man disposes?

I've bled from thorny scratches on my toes.
One way or other, you pay.
Everywhere I've lived I've planted roses.

I dig the earth in awkward poses.
Planting for others makes me say--
I do not know how man disposes.

Peace, Proud Land, and Crimson Glory grow
in other yards. I do not get to stay
anywhere. I've lived; I've planted roses.

Sun-blind blue sky, the mocking crows
reflect the lack of heart I have today.
I do not know what that man proposes.

And I have shut my eyes; the rows
of green might just as well be gray.
Everywhere, I've lived, I've planted roses.
And man proposes, yes, and man disposes.

"1993: Hope" (118)
Winter sunlight, fool's gold, pours in the south window,
fails to warm. Weak as tea, pale as bone, insubstantial
as dust on a mantle, water falling over stone.
The ground outside hard, white as the hospital bed
where my friend waits after her marrow transplant,
hoping her white count will rise. I watch birds at the window--
sparrows, titmice, finches--the plain brown, the speckled,
the ordinary, no flashy travelers up from the tropics,
where winter is a verb, not a state of the heart.
I go out to fill the feeder, feel silky grain slip
through my fingers: millet, proso, corn. Little birds,
little angels, singing their small songs of consolation.
A thin drizzle of sun slips through clouds,
a strand of hope against the icy odds.

[FutureCycle Press · Rating 5 out of 5]

We are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us. Excerpts:


PROLOGUE: MEDITATIONS ON GRASS

And now, it’s beginning, the first shy tints of green
on the trees, a leafy scrim overhead,
and the grass, an improbable green for us who know how soon
it fades to the darker tones of moss and jade,
how it crisps in the August sun, bleaches
to dun, to bone. All flesh is grass.
And underneath this green air, cancer
spreads its rhizomes,
its tendrils sprouting in too many friends:
breast, skin, lung, bone, ovary, brain,
their green time running out.
The yellow wands of the willow sway over the creek,
tiny green buds beaded like tears.
Soon they will flesh out in elliptical leaves:
lancets, knives, blades. All grass is flesh.


MEDITATION IN MID-OCTOBER

Right now, just the tips of basil have been brushed
with frost’s black kiss, but it’s coming soon, that clear
still night when Orion rises over our house
and the dew falls in an icy net of stars.
On a small farm in Wisconsin, my friend’s cancer spreads.
Piece by piece they’ve pruned her body.
Now they want to harvest her marrow.
They are promising her eternal life.
Soon, every blazing leaf will fall to earth,
stripping the trees to their black bones.
Soon, the only flowers will be the ice roses
wind etches on glass in diamonds and scrolls.
And if she refuses the surgeons
and their dazzling promises? The geese know
when it is time to go, head south.
We hear them pass overhead on starless nights,
wedges of bells in the cold thin air.

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Her poem "Patty's Charcoal Drive-in" should be enshrined in a museum somewhere. It begins:

First job. In tight black shorts
and a white bowling shirt, red lipstick
and bouncing ponytail, I present
each overflowing tray as if it were a banquet.
I'm sixteen and college-bound...

She serves up poems the same way at first. We're in suburbia, comfortable, aspiring, middle class. She marries happily. She has an autistic child. We encounter breast cancer, the death of a dear college friend. In the final poem:

We gathered to give a baby shower
in absentia for the yet-to-be-born,
two-thousand-miles-away first grandson
of a friend whose youngest child died
binge drinking. Grief, the uninvited guest,
squeezed in, sat down on the sofa...

Between the drive-in and the baby shower we never really leave the comfort of the middle class. We encounter no war, no economic struggle except by teaching English as a Second Language. But the cycle of life is witnessed, often second-hand, as the uninvited guest. The death by binge drinking is seen from the point of view of friends of the mother, not confronted first-hand in visceral detail. I don't mean this as a criticism. It's the quiet context of these deeply felt poems.

[Marne Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I knew I'd been stuck on this book for a while, but I was surprised to find it's been almost two months. The poems in this book are all so good that it was very slow going, as I wanted to give each one plenty of attention. Then I went on vacation for a while and lost my place, so I decided I just had to start at the beginning again! I have serious poem envy after finally finishing, but I need to remind myself that the poems in this "greatest hits collection" have been published over 30 years and represent the distillation of a life's work. It would be unfair to compare my own work to it, but it does give me a goal for aspiration's sake.

These are definitely "women's poems," many dealing with cooking, sewing, child-rearing, and gardening. They are written in simple, everyday language, but yet the ordinary words are assembled in a very elegant manner. Most are fairly serious, but every once in a while there's a funny one to provide comic relief. (Of these, I most like "Unclaimed Salvage & Freight," which takes an exaggerated image from a furniture store ad and runs with it.) My very favorite poem is "10th Anniversary," which you can read here: http://www.yourdailypoem.com/listpoem...

[Barbara Forrest · Rating 5 out of 5]

My new favorite poet

Poems about everyday things and occurrences that will touch you deeply. I have been rationing myself to two a day in order to make them last. Rich and rewarding.

[John Adams · Rating 4 out of 5]

A solid collection, with many poems weaving natural images and grief.

[Sue · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I read a book of poetry, I generally mark the ones I like, maybe five or six, but with this book, I’d have to mark them all. A compilation of poems from her various books, plus some new ones, Selected Poems takes us from the 80s to the current decade. Crooker spins details of ordinary days into powerful statements. Her opening poem, “Ordinary Life,” begins “This was a day when nothing happened.” She describes the usual everyday activities—sending the kids off to school, cleaning, watching the birds, starting dinner, a kiss in the kitchen, putting the kids to bed, looking out at the stars. It was “a day that unwrapped itself/like an unexpected gift.” It’s not all sunshine and stars for Crooker. A sequence of poems from “The White Poems” about her friend dying of breast cancer knocked me out. When her friend first tells her about her diagnosis, the poet, not knowing what to do, goes to work in the garden to “dig the hard March ground, turn over ice crystals in the cold dark/soil and plant peas, little gray pebbles, tuck them in with a slap/and a chink that might be a substitute for prayer.” This is good stuff.