Reviews & Interviews

Review:

Line Dance , 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 , 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.

Review:

Line Dance , 2008
reviewed by Janet McCann in Concho River Review

Barbara Crooker's new book Line Dance is luminous; she has followed the path of her first book Radiance to a world that is both freshly envisioned and dripping with meaning. The poems in her new collection are all about lines and dances. The lines are real and metaphorical, lines of poetry, clotheslines, lines that mark blanks in texts, lines of dancers, umbilicals--all the possible lines, which she looks beyond, behind, beneath, and which form the connections which create life's joy. It is in the wonder of these connections that the dances are found, the moving away and coming back, the embellishments and the play. There are a lot of physical dances, including the remembered awkward childhood dance lessons and the almost surreal wedding line dance of the title poem. The poem "Line" explains her perspective much better than I could:

I'm saying this: the spine, the matrix, the core
of what's laid down, then played over and over,
improvised, embroidered, embellished.
I love the way it moves away and then comes back,
finds itself again, the hard line, the official line,
the line of scrimmage, one down, goal to go.

These are transcendent poems, as the above quotation suggests. They lift the reader. But there is grief and hardship in them--they describe a life that has had hard circumstances to it, including deaths of friends and heavy caretaking responsibilities of aging parents and a child with autism. But the weight of daily life never obscures the vision. The epiphanies in the poems are not easy but are well-earned--the sun doesn't simply break through the clouds, but rather the recognition of the earth's beauty and bounty always has to be worked for. In these poems, nature's sudden but sparing gifts are brought forth and celebrated. Many of the poems center on elements of the natural world; there are many birds catching the speakers eye and ear, flying off with metaphorical baggage or without it. The speaker delights in inexhaustible music and in nature, finding the transcendent in the ordinary as well as in travel, which provides a counterpoint to daily life at home. The poems are shot through with all the brands of love, from eros through agape, philos, caritas.
It is the genuine affection of these poems for all of creation that makes them stay with the reader, together with the belief that they express in continuity, in the goodness of the whole.

And there is fun in these poems, too--smiles at the complicated ironies of growing up female in the fifties and sixties, wonder at the marvels of technology--though these are not high-tech poems--and the sheer delight that comes from being open to experience. The title poem is a special delight, as well as the keynote of the book. It describes the chain formed at the speaker's daughter's wedding, a dancing hand-holding chain of all the important people in the speaker's life: bride's and groom's friends, bridesmaids, the speaker's own friends, in a joyous, celebratory dancing line. The speaker enumerates the relationships, provides details of their appearance. "The bride's half-sister," she says, "is connected

. . .to my childhood friend
in a black sheath, who holds onto the khaki sports coat

of my writing friend's husband, the dentist, while
his wife, in lilac, wraps her arm around one of my neighbors,
who's linked to a friend from college in slinky silk slacks,

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.

The sheer joy of human relationships is embodied in the dance, a dance that connects past and present, that heals, that recalls. And the poems in the collection form a line dance in themselves--the pleasant and unpleasant experiences of a life, connected, holding hands, making sense. The reader leaves these poems with a sense of renewal, with a rereshed belief in the human and the divine, and with pleasure that such poems exist.