Book Review: Selected Poems (Barbara Crooker)Reviewed by Ellen LaFlecheIt is impossible to talk about Barbara Crooker's lushly evocative Selected Poems (Future Cycle Press, 2015) without first sharing some personal information. I lost my dad, husband, and brother within a stunningly horrific three-month period last winter. My dad died the same week my husband John was diagnosed with a rapidly progressive form of ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease). On the day of John's memorial service, my brother was helicoptered to the emergency room, irreversibly comatose from septic shock. He died a week later. Before my body and mind could absorb one loss, another one hit. For a good nine or ten months, I looked at and interpreted the world through a pair of what my therapist calls metaphorical "grief glasses." Having just passed the one-year anniversary of each loss, I find myself in a moving-through-grief transition period. One moment I will be wearing my "grief glasses," and the next moment I will be gazing at the world through the pre-loss lenses of joy and hope. Sometimes I wear both pairs of glasses at the same time, one set of frames sitting on top of the other, creating a strange double-vision view of the world. This transition period is having a profound effect on how I react to a poem; my interpretations and aesthetic judgments often hinge on which glasses I happen to be wearing in the moment. I spent several weeks with Selected Poems, switching lenses as I read. This book was a healing balm for my bereavement. I drew strength from the way these imagistic poems validated my own shifting internal states. Crooker's poems function as multiple mirrors that reflect and re-reflect conflicting emotions: joy and sorrow, courage and fear, death and hope, often within the same poem and, amazingly, sometimes even within a single line. In fact, mirrors are a recurring symbol throughout the book. After a year of wearing my metaphorical grief glasses, I felt a kinship with Crooker when a poem about motherhood had her wearing mirrored sunglasses while driving down the freeway on an imaginary vacation. Suffused with nature's beauty, these poems detail the joys of everyday life while grappling with significant hardship, including the challenges of mothering an autistic son. The lush images, presented in accessible language, are loaded with layers of meaning and metaphor. The opening poems focus on the poet's relationship with her autistic son. These poems balance beauty with loss, pain with joy. In "Form & Void" she celebrates the simple beauty of her child blowing bubbles.
He prances after them, staring These images of a child blowing bubbles carry layers of meaning and metaphor. The use of the word "form" in the poem's title alludes to the autistic child's deep cravings for shape. There is sorrow in this poem, a sorrow both intensified and diminished by gorgeous images of nature. The words "cosmos and void" suggest humanity's insignificance in relation to time and space but their association with a garden of lilacs insists on the importance of our lives here on earth. We are here, the poet seems to be saying, to revel in the lilacs' visual and olfactory magnificence. The more loss and hardship we endure, the harder we must revel in that beauty. The word "waltzing" adds an aural dimension of pleasure, suggesting a fantasy world of rustling ball gowns and symphonic violins. Crooker takes us into another fantasy world in "The Mother of a Handicapped Child Dreams of Respite." This is a truth-telling poem that will resonate with anyone who has provided long-term care for a disabled family member.
I want to drive away from all of this, Crooker, too, is wearing a pair of symbolic grief glasses; she is at once mourning and accepting the loss of youthful freedom. She wears a pair of mirrored sunglasses on her imaginary escape from her son's demands; these glasses are a kind of two-way visual aide allowing her to reflect on her life, and to have that life reflected back to her. I spent a long time thinking about why the mother in this poem escapes to a "starker moon." The imaginary moon in this poem is not a tropical-vacation moon suffused with warm radiant light; rather, its image within her mirrored glasses is "starker." Escape from responsibility has its pleasures, its full joyous moons, but the poet knows that real meaning is found in the small rituals of family life: caring for a child, visiting a pumpkin farm, slicing an eggplant, small domestic rituals lovingly detailed throughout the book. The starker moon floats in a deep blue ether. The word ether suggests an anesthetic numbing connected with the nineteenth century use of ether during surgery; however, the visual beauty of the image connects that numbness with joy. The poem "Echolalia and the Mockingbird" lovingly describes the poet's son David repeating various sounds he hears in his daily life. There is also a mockingbird singing in the poet's chimney. The boy and the bird combine their vocal melodies to create a haunting meta-echoing; these echoes are a kind of aural reflection and re-reflection, reinforcing the mirror theme that runs through the book.
And my son David sings his own song: I love tables of contents, and enjoy scanning poetry books for evocative titles. This collection is full of titles that are tiny poems within themselves. "Sorrow Puts on Her Blue Dress," "Driving under the Clerestory of Leaves," "Because the Body is a Flower." On a cold January day just before the one-year anniversary of my husband's death, I turned to the poem "Recipe for Grief," in which the narrator prepares eggplant parmesan while her grandmother is dying in a hospital.
I enter the ritual: Even as she braces herself for the loss of her grandmother, the narrator is evoking sun-drenched Italy, ancient hills of thyme (time). The sacred ritual of cooking Italian food brings joy, celebrating the love of family and heritage even as the narrator remains vigilant of its inherent dangers (burns and spills). It was the perfect poem for me to read on a January day of howling snow, bone-aching cold and intense loneliness, transporting me for a brief, imagistic moment to a sun-drenched vineyard in Italy. The poem engages all of the senses, acknowledging the impending loss of a family member while celebrating the aroma of herbs, the love of aunts, the sensual insistence on sun and comfort and food. There is a series of grief poems at the end of the book focusing on a friend's journey through breast cancer. There have been many excellent poems written about women's cancer, but the poem "Breast" is one of the best I have ever read.
Men would think of melons, hard white moons, I love how Crooker has de-sexualized women's breasts, honing in on what really was metaphorically lost after her friend's mastectomy. Once again, the poet has linked visually beautiful, even soothing images with sorrow and loss. The same linking of beauty and loss happens in the poems "1944: Mercy."
Soon, her hair will fall out again in clumps. In "Requiem", the friend's ashes are scattered:
When summer comes, we will take you to the river, This is a book of terrible loss and unstoppable beauty. Few poets are as skilled as Crooker at describing nature, embedding it with layer upon layer of meaning and metaphor. This a thick book, over 150 pages long, spanning several decades of Crooker's career. Because the book is divided into sections that are often focused around a specific theme that emerges from selections in a previous book, it may not be wise or possible to read the book at one sitting. Each section deserves a slow, careful taking-in, adequate time to absorb each poem's power and grace. If one criticism can be leveled against Selected Poems, it is that in choosing which of Crooker's previous books are to be represented, some of her most powerful work, notably Radiance, Line Dance and More have been omitted, and the volume's introduction by Janet McCann provides no particular reason why this should be so. According to the author, the publication had to be limited to work published in her now out-of-print chapbooks that pre-date 2005, but it would have been helpful to readers if this had been made clear in the introduction and/or if the years from which they were selected had been included in the book's title. The tradeoff, however, is that the final section of the book, "Uncollected Poems" does give readers who know her work a chance to look at something previously unread. As McCann's introduction does point out, the careful reader may notice slight changes in style and tone as the book progresses, but these changes reflect the poet's growth, an even deeper awareness that comes with age. Like the rest of the poems in the book, these final poems are truth-telling poems, revealing even more layers of the poet's past hurts and joys. The poet is not afraid to let the reader know she has experienced middle-age anger and regret. One of these final poems is "Making Strufoli," in which the poet tries to assimilate her father's death while remembering big and small hurts from childhood. There is rich irony in this poem. Stufoli is a traditional Italian sweet, but its preparation evokes some bitter-tasting emotions in the daughter. This poem can be compared to "Recipe for Grief" (cited above) in which the poet draws on her Italian heritage, preparing eggplant while her grandmother is dying. There is anger in this later poem, represented by the knife slicing into the strufoli dough. Still, the poet's unshakeable belief in beauty shines through, transcending negative emotions: Making Strufoli (a traditional Italian sweet)
…I'm at the counter, kneading dough, heating olive oil until it spits. This is one of the finest poems I've read about the father-daughter relationship. All I can say in conclusion is YES!
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