Reviews & Interviews

Review:

Line Dance May, 2009
reviewed by Phebe Davidson in Cider Press Review

Line Dance, Barbara Crooker’s second full book of poems, carries its readers into the lyrically rendered universe of the poet’s world and life. Crooker sets her tone and her metaphoric stance with the title poem that opens the book. This tour de force has the wavy left margin of a dance—which could be anything from the Alley Cat to the venerable Conga Line– giving poetic form to both the energy of the dance and the joyous host of dancers at a wedding reception:

and there, at the end, is my ex-husband,
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, circling around the bride
in her frothy gown, bubbles rising
in a fluted glass, spilling out, running over.
(“Line Dance”)

The conjoined metaphors of line and dance create a series of meditations that range from small everyday detail to the vast cyclical movement of love and sorrow, welcome and loss that punctuate even the easiest of life. There are poems that offer show us a cardinal who “stabs / the hedgerow with his piercing notes” (“One Song”) and “tiny lettuces just coming up, / so perfect they could make you cry: Green Towers, / Red Sails, Oak Leaf” (“Gratitude”). With the poet, we observe her visiting mother, whose “skin is thin / as a folded road map” (“Hummingbird”). With her we hear the old records her autistic son plays over and over again and wonder “When we’re gone, what then? / What slot will he fit into like a quarter / slipping in a jukebox for three plays, / songs you could dance to all night long?” (“45s, LPs”). Crooker’s exceptional sense of telling detail illuminates this book with the sense of life as it is lived and felt, full of small pleasures, not free of pain, yet full as well of light.

Crooker is extremely deft with her craft. Her sensibility, for all its love of detail, embodies an almost austere recognition of the seriousness that underscores the small, necessary moments she loves, Line Dance never settles into (or for) an easy nostalgia or gossamer lyric effect. When Crooker remembers Janis Joplin, for instance, it is not just “pedal to the floor, / hundred miles an hour” or “skinny hips, shimmy and shine”—it is also “one loud moan of pain / through the gravel and broken glass in your throat” (“Janis”). The memory of sunlight that “licked our arms and faces like a rough- / tongued cat” (“When the Acacia Blooms”) becomes something more, an obligation perhaps, or a responsibility to love what is given, so that writing of sunflowers, she tells us “I nod, heavy-headed, / and heft my burden of light” Wisely, she brings the book full circle, from the wedding’s dance of joy to the nourishment of gravy, the music of its “bubble and seethe,” the way it “makes / delicious everything it covers” (“Gravy”) .

Review:

Line Dance Dec, 2008
reviewed by Kenneth Pobo in Small Press Review:

This collection of 51 poems is a delight. Crooker manages to weave readers into many moods, all with a deft touch, a good ear, and precise lines. She has a voice that is rich with experience and a great eye for detail. In "Lemons," a moving poem of a mother's loss of her first-born child, the mother says, "I was hollow, / a fruit that had been pulped / for juice, leaving nothing / but a shell, no flesh, no seeds."

Yet the poems also embrace the political without hammering a message into us, showing us a world, creating world. In the book's last section, she has poems connected with sixties and seventies pop music. Crooker has written the first poem I've ever read called "Question Mark and the Mysterians" and it's a winner. I may be biased since "96 Tears" is my second favorite song of all time, but her poem is more about the questions that come while growing up, questions that often remain. The presence of the sixties remains vital, and, in "Making Sense of the Sixties," the speaker encourages us to keep marching.

When I think of a line dance, I see people in a line, moving, laughing, dancing: a form of connection. These poems seek connection--with each other and, deeply, with language. The title poem kicks off the collection, a poem of celebration which also acknowledges loss. The setting is a wedding reception. As the speaker observes and participates in the dance, she realizes that the dead are in the room, part of the invisible dance. The ending suggests a peace, a gratititude for this brief but affirming revelation.

Crooker goes from strength to strength. Her previous collection, Radiance, also from Word Press, was a terrific first book. Its promise is more than fulfilled in Line Dance.

Review:

Line Dance Jun, 2008
Reviewed by Rebecca Faust in Appalachian Heritage

Line Dance is poet Barbara Crooker’s second full
length collection of poetry, and one that more than
lives up to the high standard set by her first book,
Radiance, which won the 2005 Word Press First
Book Competition and was a finalist for the 2006
Paterson Poetry Prize.

Several poems in this collection (“Poem on a Line
by Anne Sexton,”“Simile,” “The VCCA Fellows Visit
the Holiness Baptist Church,”“One Song,”
“Gratitude,” and “When the Acacia Blooms” to name
a few) were written during the twelve residencies
Crooker spent at The Virginia Center for the
Creative Arts, a colony for artists and writers
located in Sweet Briar, Virginia, and much of
her imagery derives from the flora and fauna
of that region. Old fashioned flowers like
peonies, roses, goldenrod, and asters bloom
in these pages, along with morning glories
“whose blue mouths are open to the
sky/whose throats are white stars”
in a poignant expression of loss and
longing in “Blues for Karen.” The poems
are alive with the wings of juncos,
chickadees,woodpeckers, swallows and
mockingbirds; a cardinal is “the very
essence of red,” (“One Song”), finches
are “little chips of sun” (“At the
Thistle Feeder, Finches”) and a
hummingbird is “quick as thought,
and just as elusive” “Hummingbird”).
“Gratitude” gives us the entire
aviary in a single, vivid image:

How many times have I forgotten
to give thanks? The late day sun
shines through the pink wisteria with its green
and white leaves as if it were stained glass,
there’s an old cherry tree that one lucky Sunday
bloomed with a rainbow: cardinals, orioles,
goldfinches, blue jays, indigo buntings,

The book’s title makes a pun on the stylized dance
form (think the “Hustle” or the “Electric Slide”)
and also on the way that a line of poetry can dance
when the sound and meter are right. In developing
the musical motif that runs through this book,
Crooker draws from a wide canon which includes
Jazz,(“Hard Bop”), Gospel (“The VCCA Fellows
Visit the Holiness Baptist Church, Amherst,
Virginia”), Rock (“Me ‘n Bruce Springsteen
Take my Baby Off to College”), and the
primitive percussions in “Rhythm Section,”
one of the handful of poems that treat with
great delicacy and restraint the subject
of Crooker’s autistic child. Musical images
crop up in unexpected and refreshing places,
such as in this description of a winter
blizzard in “Valentine:” “Now the snow is
busy, composing its small white music, the
little notes tumbling/off the staff.” Dance
images also make graceful gestures,with two
poems actually set in the dancing schools
of the author’s youth (“Miss Susan’s Dance
Academy” and “Sonnet for Mr. Rutherford”).

In its most literal sense, a line dance is a
formation of people dancing in rows and following
specified pattern of synchronized steps. Crooker plays
off the literal meaning in the title poem, whose very
shape on the page mimics the weaving, linked-arm
wedding dance that the poem describes. Likewise,
the titles of the opening poems for each the book’s
four sections evoke the music/dance theme: “Breath,”
“Line,” “Miss Susan’s Dance Academy,” and “One
Song.” Crooker’s music is all-inclusive, the music
of life itself, and in her world even eggplants and
sunflowers chime in or turn a step. The title poem’s
wedding dance embraces everyone the speaker has
“ever loved,” including her ex-husband and “his
soon-to-be-estranged second wife, the one he left
us for.” The theme is reiterated as a coda in the
last poem, aptly entitled “Gravy” for the wonderful
whole that transcends “those/little odd bits and
pieces, the parts that could/be discarded but aren’t.”
Even in this poem about mixing flour with fat to make
the least pretentious of sauces, Crooker still
manages to sustain the dance/music motif as the
speaker’s spoon becomes a “baton” and the gravy
itself the “music, the bubble/and seethe as it plays
its score.”Here, gravy represents the same unity
achieved in a song from an arrangement of notes,
or in a dance from the pattern of its steps. The
rejected, the disaffected, “the difficult uncle/
or the lonely neighbor invited out of duty,”
the autistic child,the ex-husband and even
all of his future ex-wives—-all are part of
the “holy family of gravy,” disparate notes
that somehow finally,improbably, blend into
a coherent and beautiful song.

The image of a line as it is manifested in a line
of poetry is another motif that runs through and
unifies Line Dance. In one of my favorite
examples, Crooker likens a poem to “a clothesline
hanging/between two trees” in which “the words,
hung by wooden/pegs, move with the wind.”
“This Poem”). Lines can be literal, like the
“two straight lines across shellacked pine” in the
floor at the Dance Academy, or the human line made
by the interlocked arms of dancers at a family
wedding. In the hauntingly bleak “Zero at the
Bone,” lines are “unwritten” on a “blank text
of the snow.” Sometimes lines are even empty
spaces waiting to be filled in, such as those
in SSI forms in “Climbing the Jade Mountain”
or in a remedial English test failed by the
speaker’s son in “Simile.” Line shape varies
in almost every imaginable way, from the geometric
“pyramid of X’s” observed while ascending
the Eiffel Tower to the “sinuous loops of the
Seine” in one poem inspired by Crooker’s travels
to France.

Crooker devotes an entire poem to the subject
in “Line,” the poem which lies at the heart of
her book. In a clever technical inversion of
the notion of a straight line, she begins
with circumlocution—-a series of negations
telling what she does NOT mean by the word
(“not what someone hands you in a bar” and
“not what you use to go fishing”). What she
is talking about is something more fundamental
and metaphorical, “the spine, the matrix, the
core/of what’s laid down, then played over and
over,/improvised, embroidered,embellished,” what
“moves away and then comes back.” Here she is
referring, of course, to the theme that underlies
any jazz improvisation, and also to the plumb line
that runs through this book from beginning to end:
themes of family, simple faith, nature, and the joy
and gratitude that is possible even in a world that
includes winter, death, and children lost in a knot
garden of Autism. Autism is a “labyrinth,” she tells
us, “of false twists/and turns, blind passageways,
spirals that lead/nowhere.” But above it, “chevrons
of geese wedge/their way across the sky each
autumn.” In other words, there is a theme, a plan,
a way through and out of the knot garden, even if
we can’t always divine it.

The notion of variations-on-a-line unifies
Line Dance thematically, but it is also
a technical device that Crooker uses to connect
and organize the poems, arranged so that each
inclines to the next in what appears to be a
natural, almost inevitable sequence. This device
is most evident in the first section of the book
where the theme of a father’s death and the blue
of a “blameless “sky in “Breath” lead directly to
the elegiac “Blues for Karen,” in its turn seeded
with the image of “this old blue world” that sets
up the cartographic images in the two poems that
follow. A close reader of this book will be
rewarded by the discovery of a daisy chain-like
string of images and words that connect one poem
to the next by means of repetition of an image,
word or sound from the preceding poem. This
movement of one piece towards the next and
hearkening back to pieces that came before
is yet another expression of the
variation-on-a-line theme, another enactment
of the dance that gives the book its name:
“two steps forward, one step back.”
(“Knot Garden”)

From the first to the last poem in the
collection, Crooker sustains and embroiders
her themes about family, art, and identity
and the result is a tour de force
jam session worthy of any master jazz
musician. The analogy is an apt one,
for she uses the same technique of
exquisite control within artistic parameters
over the material that she seems so
effortlessly to spin out for our delighted
eyes and ears. “I’m riffing on the warm air,”
she exults, “the wing beats of my lungs/that
can take this all in, flush the heart’s red
peony.” And when Crooker joins the trees to
“bend to the sky”and “clap their green hands
in gratitude,” this reader does too,
thankful for the opportunity to read this
remarkable and beautiful book.