~ROSEMARY WINSLOW~
BARBARA
CROOKER: LINE
DANCE
The work is deeply satisfying because the
poems begin
in ordinary and
extraordinary difficulties and find
their way to a true and
hard-won
light on the other side
of resentment, impatience,
anger, and sorrow.
She takes
the reader with her through
a thousand epiphanies
in language
that is musical, plain-voiced, and richly textured.
In Radiance,
Barbara Crooker’s first, and award-winning book, a “bare woods” in the
Blue Ridge is imaged as “an eager congregation / waiting for the
service to begin.” We live immersed in radiance, she
writes—“solid yellow fields / of mustard bright shining as the sun”
(“Stand Up, Stand Up”). We are all connected, all of us—our
personalities, trials, frustrations, griefs, joys, minutiae of daily
existence, in a line dance celebrating our unity.
Crooker’s second book, Line Dance, expresses the music of
the human dance as a flow of individual trials, hurt, grief, so many
kinds of losses, overcoming, acceptance, compassion, love in which we
share our lives, and in sharing and the recognition of our
connectedness we are uplifted. And no one writing today makes
more uplifting, light-filled poems than Crooker. The work is
deeply satisfying because the poems begin in ordinary and extraordinary
difficulties and find their way to a true and hard-won light on the
other side of resentment, impatience, anger, and sorrow. She
takes the reader with her through a thousand epiphanies in language
that is musical, plain-voiced, and richly textured. Reading and
rereading rewards the ear with pleasures and surprises and the wisdom
of spirit of one who has lived close to the bone. As in a poem
mourning a child she bore who survived one day:
For you have entered another country,
gotten a visa, gone to live, where we
. . . can only be tourist. You send us note .
. ..
The map of this country defies
cartography,
there are no expressways or
shortcuts.
Instead, you must come into the
City of Grief
as an immigrant, someone who has
come to dwell,
be ready to stay a long time. . .
. And the coasts,
too, are uncharted, rocky shoals,
desolate reefs.
Throw away the guidebooks. Enter
on your knees.
. . . . The map of the
heart has no relief.
(“The Geography of Grief”)
In the last line’s echo of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, the theme is from
the later Eliot, the submission before unalterable experience in a kind
of reverent prayer that honors the difficulty of facing the fact of
death, an ever-returning grief, in a posture that, as so many other
poems attest, open the heart to light.
And moving through darkness to light to entwine them
in one dance is Crooker’s subject. The line dance of the title poem
takes shape at the poet’s daughter’s wedding. It gathers the
bride’s family and friends, including the ex-mother-in-law—“everyone
I’ve ever loved”—into a bubbling, celebratory rhythm punctuated by
Frank Sinatra singing “New York, New York” in the background.
This opening strategy is Crooker’s characteristic move—taking subjects
close to home and expanding thematically to larger humankind in a
physical scene infused with spiritual motion and that brings
insight.
Here is the line dance forming, details of the
ordinary, beer wrapped in with the delicate shine of a girl’s hair:
the groom’s sister also holding
a bottle of beer; my
youngest daughter
at the
end, hair, a glory of red ringlets,
her arm’s around the bride’s half-sister,
who’s giggling
in embarrassment, and she’s
connected to my
childhood friend in a black . . . .
The stretch of the dark and light gain easy access side-by-side by
harking back to the common ground of American religious life and
reference that is unobtrusively implicated in the (crowning) glory of
women’s hair, in the black of mourning, in the ex-relatives embraced in
the love of the dance and the poem. That is not to say that
Crooker does not see the spaces between people. She does.
And she sees them as spaces we human beings have put there. With
humorous irony, her ex-husband is a guest,
the
one who didn’t want to be married any
more, holding his
soon-to-be-estranged second
wife, the one he left us for, at arm’s length. Start
spreading the news:
everyone I’ve ever loved
is here today, even the dead, raising a glass
and
dancing . . . . bubbles rising
in
a fluted glass, spilling out, running over.
The final line’s reference to the Twenty-Third Psalm (“My cup runneth
over, surely goodness and mercy shall follow me . . . .”), doubled with
the suggestion of music (“fluted glass”), is the grace note on which
Crooker poems close. She takes us through tribulations, large and
small–death of an infant, death of parents, a son with autism, a spat
with a mate, encounters with those who live and believe differently
from the poet—and shows us how to emerge not only with acceptance but
with a joy won in our common life of struggle and the will to join
hands and move as one.
The book is arranged in four sections, moving from
grief through recovery. The first section tells of deep losses and the
large hurts that accompany them, and ends with “Lemons,” an ars poetica. Written in her
characteristic anecdotal free verse, Crooker likens the poem to a
lemon, in which writing and recalling her writing causes “one of the
poems [to] peel / away the thin rind of memory, and there I was, back /
in the maternity ward / where my first-born died.” The memory is
recomposed, the empty “white and cold” filled and enlivened by the
birth of another daughter’s son: “there was Daniel, shining and . . .
rinsed with light from another/ world . . . .” While
the poems early in the book work with the colors blue, white, and gray,
from “Lemons” onward, light and its substantial representatives join
(not dispel) the tones of grief as homely spiritual signs—lemons,
honey, light, yellow sun, the moon’s milk, yellow flowers, gold, joy,
bread and a rose borne to meet a speaker at an airport gate where
“the rest of your life is waiting.” The second section expands
the ars poetica and the
delight of language, its potential to draw us together in tenderness
(“Simile,” “Poem on a Line by Anne Sexton, ‘We are All Writing God’s
Poem’”), fortitude (“Les Faux Amis,” “Climbing the Jade Mountain”), and
memory (“Concerning Things That Can Be Doubled,” “This Poem”).
The third section might have been titled,
“Openings”; for the poems there are of beginnings and beginnings
again–renewals imaged in dances, from childhood incidents to the
decision to keep loving fully a husband in the dark night, to “speak
the language of the body, / dancing in the dark” (“”Impermanent
Joy”). These were, for me, some of the most engaging poems in the
book, as they draw forth the reader’s own memories of school, church,
mating, and parenting. They draw the reader directly into the
“line dance” the poet has prepared.
The keynote for the last poems in Line Dance is
expressed in the epigraph to the beautiful poem, “Ephemera”: “For
whoever has despised the day of small things?—Zechariah 4:10.” While
the small ordinary things and events of life are Crooker’s subject
matter, the last section intensifies the honoring and celebrating of
the lowly through concentration. A cardinal, sycamore leaves,
sunflowers, hummingbirds, an eggplant, her autistic son’s math
equations and reading (Dick and Jane), a daughter leaving for
college—these are things Crooker sets as signs of “[w]hat matters in
the end . . . how well / we lived in that small space where the hyphen
/ goes.”
Line Dance, Barbara
Crooker. Word Press, 2008. ISBN: 1933456922 $17.00
© by Rosemary Winslow
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