Radiance, by Barbara Crooker

Radiance by Barbara Crooker:
A Review

Radiance. Poems by Barbara Crooker
Copyright Barbara Crooker 2005
Published by Word Press
P.O. Box 541106
Cincinnati,
OH 45254-1106
ISBN:1932339914
LCCN:2004116495

Order online from http://www.word-press.com/crooker.html
Interview with Barbara Crooker at this magazine.
http://www.barbaracrooker.com/

Barbara Crooker’s collected poetry in her first published book Radiance is winner of the Word Press First Book Prize.

Throughout her long career as a poet she has received numerous awards and recognition for her work including the W.B.Yeats Society of New York Award 2004 and the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Prize. All of the poems that appear in Radiance have been previously published and are listed in the acknowledgements.

Barbara Crooker lives with her family and autistic son in middle class rural America, several of her poems, which are in six sections, attempt to understand the world as experienced through the mind of her autistic child. In her Autism Poem: Bricks she ends:

–/ what did I know/ of how to build a language brick by brick,/what kind of mortar could hold these words?/

Although she has received recognition through Christian Journals as a Christian writer and naturally there are allusions as to her spiritual beliefs, it would be wrong to simply categorise her under this banner, as her work has a much wider scope, which plays both with the themes of art and its interaction with the concrete mundaneities of life and is of interest as much to the European reader as the American. Nearly all of the poems in Radiance are written in a richly textured vocabulary and flowing free verse with its own internal rhyme patterns, assonances and alliterations. Another element in her work are her references to the Post Impressionist French Painters or those influenced by those schools, eg. Renoir, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Manet and Monet, appear as an added dimension in an otherwise ordinary set of circumstances or as a relief when things become no longer tolerable as in The Gyre

/Unable to sleep, I thought of Monet/at eighty, painting water lillies, pond, and sky/ over 250 times…/And my compulsive son asks questions without answers/ad infinitum in an endless loop…/

Or in White Lilacs, After a painting by Edward Manet:

/When the world/was reduced to a black flag/of pain, what else could he do/but paint flowers, white/lilacs in a crystal vase,/ prismatic in the May sunlight/

Paradox is never very far away in her works, to remind me of the thought in Paul Valery’s words "The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us." They do not necessarily represent universal truths, as in such poems as The Unfinished Work in Blue and Gold, which starts

/will never be completed; no matter how hard I try/…/he said, “I look for blue.”/But you don’t have to look hard,/Vincent, my man, the blues/will find you anyway,/even on a starry night./

Or as in The Deconstruction of Snow, which starts again in paradox

/For snow itself is an absence/

and which as a whole work, I see more as a remark on the limits structural linguistics can impose on consciousness and reality.

/But no matter./The text is everything./The only thing./The rest is/diamond-dazzled/ glitter-feathered/hexagonal-crystalled/silence./

As the poet herself says, in one of her interviews, she purposely tries to have two or three threads going in a single poem that somehow come back together at the end. There are also poems written in the spirit of the Confessional Poets, in reminiscences of childhood experiences as in Junior High, Home Economics…

/our old Singers, black as licorice/gold scrolls and flowers…/We didn’t know what was coming: the broken marriages/ the sweet babies turned teenagers;/couldn’t imagine a future that didn’t fit/the pattern…/

And again in Nearing the Menopause, I ran into Elvis at Shoprite…

/The first time I heard Elvis/ on the radio, I was poised between girlhood and what comes next./

Much of her work in Radiance deals with direct and concrete observations of nature and especially on the themes of birds in their differing species and groups, as in A Congregation of Grackles…

/Startled, they pour out of the woods,/ a long black scarf unwinding/.

Or in The Woman Who Called Hawks from the Sky

/When nothing in my life seems predictable or constant,/down he comes, a whistle on the wind, conjured/.

And in Van Gogh’s Crows, a chilling piece, where she draws an analogy between her son’s disturbed mood sensing an oncoming hurricane and Van Gogh in wheat fields…

/those wheat fields under the pulsing/sun, the scornful voices of the crows, the writhing blue sky./ Think how hard the simplest action must be/when those voices won’t leave you alone,/

One of the poems that most impressed me for sheer savagery of the wilderness and the solitary minuteness of human observation, starts off section ii. The Comet and the Opossum: she finds the opossum’s dead body when winter’s snow has melted.

Last night, looking up at the inky blackness, I felt myself
shrink, smaller than the smallest bones in the opossum’s tail,
and then I found the comet one last time. It seemed to be fixed
in the firmament, a nebulous white light in the western sky,
but was, like this transient world, rapidly drifting away.

A Review

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