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Slow Wreckage: Poems
by Barbara Crooker
67 poems ~ 104 pages
Price: $16.95
Publisher: Grayson Books
ISBN #: 979-8-9888186-3-2
To Order: Amazon
Reviewed by Michael Escoubas
“A Quiet Normal Life,” (Collected Poems, page 523), is among the lesser appreciated poems by Wallace Stevens. Here a mature Stevens has come to terms with living in his seventh decade. He writes, “Here in his house and in his room, / In his chair, the most tranquil thought grew peaked / And the oldest and the warmest heart was cut / By gallant notions on the part of night–” As the poem continues Stevens discerns profound value in his advancing years.
I thought of these lines as I engaged Barbara Crooker’s new book, Slow Wreckage. This is a journey collection. However, it is distinguished by and set apart from any other collection of its kind … this is Barbara Crooker’s take on her advancing years. And by extension ours as well.
In six untitled divisions, Crooker leads readers through the phases of her life. She opens with a telling sonnet from her youth:
Then
The past is never dead. It’s not even past. William Faulkner
Oak leaves stamped against a chicory sky
swirled with clouds, like a marble I once had
and lost. It’s probably still there, caught in a dry
puddle, a tree root, or one of those cracked
pavements of childhood that we walked
ongoing to school. We roamed the neighborhood
in feral packs, marked up the curb with chalk:
hopscotch, marbles, kickball, only going in for food
or band-aids. No sunscreen, helmets, fancy bikes.
Once, we rode to the creek to swim, dead deer
resting in the shallows. We didn’t think alike:
was it safe to swim, or not? I can still hear
my mother calling my name as darkness fell
and fireflies sent messages that only they could spell.
This word-picture sets an early tone of how things used to be. She recalls notes of tension: “We (referring to her mother) didn’t think alike.” In other poems, Crooker’s father’s festering anger is a pervasive threat within her family. Nothing is “sugar-coated.” Later, Crooker deals with her father.
These early-life profiles appear in nostalgic relief as memories are now superseded by other things. “Obsolescence,” explores this theme.
Crooker’s expert use of irony and hyperbole pervades the prose poem “Mirror.” The poet reacts to life's undeniable truth with tongue tucked neatly in her cheek.
Mirror
Who is this woman in my mirror, the one who looks like she's been worked on by Rembrandt or Dürer? Why are there mail sacks sagging under her chin? Wasn't it just last week I was doing my hair on rollers the size of orange juice cans? Why is my scalp, pink as an eraser, showing through? What happened to my snappy ponytail that switched and danced when I cheered? I still feel fresh as the first day of school, new plaid skirt, box of sharpened crayons, pencils that no one has written with yet. Why is this young man from down the street shoveling my driveway? Doesn't he know my shoulders have lifted great burdens? Can't he see I've already hefted huge shovelfuls of sorrows and stars?
Crooker’s book title enters early-on in private musings perhaps familiar:
On a Late Birthday
No one wants to hear about it,
the body's slow wreckage:
skin cracking like porcelain
left in the kiln too long,
words that recede mid-sentence
like the slow-ebbing tide.
A string of minor infirmities
I tell like a rosary: the need
for more breath going up hills;
the clarity of events from ten years ago,
while yesterday is cloudy weather.
Sleep that fails to come, the digital clock
at 3 a.m. Knees on the stairs, refusing
to hinge. Spots on the hand that mimic
the small toad I found sunk in mud
in a corner of the vegetable garden last spring.
Stylistically, Crooker has never been stronger both in range of subject and variety of technique: non-rhyming couplets and quatrains, prose poems, free verse, aphorisms, sonnets, villanelles, and more grace her pages.
While the aging process is her main concern, she weaves into the whole a lifetime of experiences borne of a deeply spiritual worldview. I was impressed by Crooker’s social commentary, concerns about climate change, acute sorties into historical mistakes made to specific people groups. Her Bible referenced sonnets are moving because they state the truth without tiresome “finger-wagging.”
It is as if Slow Wreckage is a summation of fragments collected, organized, and set down, all the pieces in their proper place … a life-tapestry hung on the living room walls of her readers.
Celebration closes out this thoroughly entertaining and wise appraisal of life. Standing forth with raised fist, the poet announces, “Life is worth it all, let’s set up the picnic!”
I Want to Write a Poem to Celebrate
the body, its mystery as it ages,
the scars, the lines, the silver threads
unwinding. I no longer care about air-brushed
celebrities people in glossy magazines. I want
to celebrate: weak ankles courtesy of afternoons
chasing a puck on a frozen pond. Thighs,
more Venus of Willendorf than Kate Moss
or Twiggy. Upper arms that wobble like jello
no matter how many reps I do at the gym. Belly
that stretched big as a watermelon, then spit out
(how did that happen?) sweet pink babies.
Breasts that fed them, rivers of thin blue milk.
I've made the turn onto the unpaved road,
where fat yellow leaves hang overhead. Things
don't get better from here. But over there,
in the clearing, beyond the fields of goldenrod,
New England asters, pearly everlasting,
they're waiting: the friends who've gone before,
my parents, grandparents, lost baby. They've
set up a picnic: checked tablecloth, sourdough
bread, French cheeses, green grapes, red wine.
The air is sweet with fermentation and birdsong.
The sun slants in from the west and, like Midas,
paints everything gold.
The last line of Wallace Stevens’ poem, “A Quiet Normal Life,” reads,
His (Her) actual candle blazed with artifice.
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