Slow Wreckage, by Barbara Crooker. West Hartford, Connecticut: Grayson Books, 2024.
Barbara Crooker’s poems never disappoint. This is her tenth book, and her work has won wide acclaim and many followers; her many awards would take a page to list. Crooker’s work is a feast for the senses; she describes nature in such a luminous detail that the physical becomes spiritual. The more closely she focuses on an image, whether it is an artwork, a flower, a fruit, a line of poetry, an animal, even a seasonal landscape, the more the object in her sight acquires translucence. The metaphysical comes through the physical via the poet’s unique angle of vision.
If the vision of this book is a little darker than the earlier ones, nevertheless, these poems hold joy. The collection is divided into six sections, each of which seems to show a theme—the first, reminiscence; the second, physical disability and surgery; and so forth, as the work proceeds toward a glimpse of the conclusion of life, and the last sections question what comes after. The autumn/winter poems of the last sections do not answer the question, but they do have a sense of wonder and even promise.
Her usual presences are here, and the poems glitter with gorgeous images. But loss and death take a larger role in this book, without canceling out its spirituality or its beauty. In the end, there seems to be something positive about even aging, the coming of disabilities, and the realization that life will end.
“On a Late Birthday” provides the book’s title:
No one wants to hear about it,
the body’s slow wreckage;
skin cracking like porcelain
left in the kiln too long . . .
A recital of old age’s infirmities concludes:
Sleep that fails to come, the digital clock
at 3 am. Knees on the stairs, refusing
the hinge. Spots on the hand that mimic
the small toad I found sunk in mud
in the corner of the vegetable garden last spring. (p. 25)
Finally the images of physical decrepitude bring her mind back to the spring garden with the toad in it, perhaps suggesting the fecundity of life in the return of spring.
One of Crooker’s major skills is the list poem: in her work the piled-up images often come in a rush, flashing past in the mind of the reader as they lead to a conclusion that pulls them together and gives them meaning. The rush of images in these poems is like a fireworks display, tiny rockets ending in a burst of light. Everything returns to earth eventually, but the earth is holy. So, while many of the poems in this book reflect the pain of life, but measure it against the beauty and vitality of human experience. These glimpses of delight turn up when least expected. Moreover, wit and humor sparkle through the poems. She even pokes fun at herself, her aging body. The humor adds light to the overall picture.
There are reprises of many of her early themes—society’s greed, lack of communication, subjugation of women, how artists think and live. The ekphrastic poems here tend to look at the old age of artists, the maker as important as the art. The pain endured throughout the collection is both physical, from surgery and other medical issues, but it is also the mental agony, the pain of loss that becomes increasingly heavy with age.
“And Now It’s September” in the last section begins with the pairing of old and new, decay and growth:
And the garden diminishes: cucumber leaves rumpled
And rusty, zucchini felled by borers, tomatoes sparse
On the vines. But out in the perennial beds, there’s one last
Blast of color: Ignitions of goldenrod, flamboyant
asters, spiraling mums, all those flashy spikes waving
In the wind, conducting summer’s final notes.
Its conclusion is another ambiguous image—the arrival and disappearance of the blackbirds:
. . . . Hundreds of blackbirds ribbon in, settle
in the trees, so many black leaves, then, just as suddenly,
they’re gone. This is Autumn’s great departure gate
and everyone, boarding passes in hand, waits
patiently in a long, line. ( p. 90)
Is the ribbon of blackbirds a message, like the slogans on renaissance paintings? I tend to think so. The poems use seasonal imagery in much the way Wallace Stevens did: everything is both a singular truth and a trail of associations, beliefs, memories. Crooker uses many commas and fewer periods fittingly to in her demonstration that life rushes on, breathlessly. In the onrush of experience, is there a revelation? These poems seem to suggest there is. Slow Wreckage is a pleasure to come back to. Where can we find a glimpse of the holy, even of the divine, with no dogma, no strings attached.
Janet McCann is an old Texas poet who taught for 47 years at Texas A&M University. Her most recent book is Life List (Wipf and Stock, 2021).