At the heart of Barbara Crooker’s new collection lies a series of poems in which she directly engages the illness and death of her mother. The series begins a little over halfway through the first of four parts and continues through the second. We settle into it by way of eight poems set in late autumn when, as she writes of October, “leaf means loss, and bird means go” (8). The heart of the matter begins with hands curled around a cup of tea that “feels like a benediction, / a reprieve from my crazy life: bringing my mother / from one doctor to another, as systems shut down, / doors start to close; going to interviews / with my disabled son to find, in the end, / that promised programs aren’t funded, / and when school ends in June, that’s it, so long” (11). The body in which this heart beats is the ordinary rhythm of life — beginning (as some calendars do) with autumn and loss, with endings marked by systems shutting down. This is a deft weaving of the personal and the political that gives us pause, especially in the light of a gold standard spun out of the Robert Frost epigraph: “Nothing gold can stay.”
The first part begins with a poem titled “Invoice,” wrapped around the observation that “Some days, it’s hard to see beneath / the surface,” leading to the (apparently) rhetorical question “What choice / when the world burns to ash, to gold?” It seems the offer we can’t refuse, what we are billed for, is sky’s blue cerulean bolt of cotton — and the price is “so much death — // the year, the leaves, old friends” (3). But the tone lightens with late October as vaudeville (4) and the autumn maple tree as an ecdysiast (a stripper) for whom “age is just another ring, a thing / she’s happy to accumulate” (5). The wages of sin is death slips into a fragment of a familiar nursery rhyme said to be about death — “all fall down” (5) — as the maple tree slips out of red silk on satin blue sheets. Falling is the price we pay for our embodiment, which is precisely what Crooker celebrates, even as she confronts her grief at the loss of her mother, an experience beautifully embodied in the image of “becoming part of the past while she’s still / here” (13). The first part ends as the world ends: “nothing is just right. Nothing will ever be / just right, as her body fails and fails” (15).
That is not to say that nothing is right, but rather that nothing is just right. Every body fails and fails, but that does not diminish the poet’s celebration of the body. It is interesting that two snippets associated with seventeenth century England, a time and place shadowed by Plague, slip into the poems so seamlessly that they are not explicitly noted: the nursery rhyme in part one and a phrase from one of John Donne’s holy sonnets in part two (“batter my heart, three- / personed God”). Crooker disarms Donne’s brutal imagery by taking batter as “flour, salt, and milk” in which the heart is fried “good and golden as this afternoon, / one shining lake of light” (21). This is a lovely spin on imagery often associated with fire and brimstone — no island in a lake of fire, but a body gold as a bright afternoon, a tasty morsel in a lake of light. The eucharistic image is consistent with Donne (whose twisted humor is often lost in readings of his poetry), and there is reason to smile in the face of loss.
One of the ways that Crooker spins a eucharistic imagery with a tone reminiscent of the blues (and these poems are infused with blue from beginning to end) is through her loving attention to the preparation of food (and here she often brings Lucille Clifton to mind). The second part begins with ambrosia, food for the gods with the power to confer immortality. That is what her mother, dying, calls the food the poet brings to her — sometimes complicated, sometimes simple. It is the making, the bringing, the sharing, the presence of an other that gives it power. She depicts her mother’s appetite as concentrating, finally, on sweetness — a taste for donuts: “Right hand limp under the sheet, she grabbed that donut / in her left, and squeezed. The pallid yellow filling / ran down her arm, and chocolate oozed between her fingers. / When the chewy dough was gone, she licked the rest off, / every bit. And when she was done, she sighed. Ambrosia” (19). This becomes a communion of Peeps — “Spun sugar and air, molded in clever forms” (24) — in the backyard with the hospice chaplain: “When there were / no more words or tears, I ripped open the last packet / of Peeps, tore their little marshmallow bodies, / their sugary blood on my hands, and gave a piece / to each of us. It melted, grainy fluff / on our tongues, and it was good” (24).
This is real presence.
“Time keeps zigzagging” in this collection “past/present/past, / like that fat red fox running in the meadow’s tall grass” (31), and the seasons work their way in a stutter step to spring, wading across a river of grief. In “Goddesses,” we hear the name of Enheduanna, “the first poet” whose words come down “through the fabric of time,” as though in the weaving of it, set against Washington, “where men make monuments / of cold white stones” and the women of this poem, like the woman Enheduanna, have their mothers — “both recently gone” — on their hearts. Recently gone, “their absence “an old one” (32). A motherless child on one page, a woman is her mother on the next: “A woman is her mother, but alone” (34).
Given the repetition of the image of sleeping alone as one more reminder that we all die, it is interesting that this image of being her mother, but alone is followed immediately by a memory of something her grandfather made, a table her mother’s brother kept “though it was promised to her.” It was made “by their father at his lumber // yard, the one he owned, then lost… // She wanted it because his hands / had turned the legs, glued the boards, // sanded them smooth, applied / the stain, brought out the grain, // rubbed to a luster with butcher’s / wax. She wanted it not for its beauty, // but because it was a letter, / from father to daughter” (35).
Words again, down through time’s fabric, present.
In the third part, still zigzagging, folding time, there is a visit to an observatory: “One by one, we hear God’s name / gasped in wonder as we take a peek at Orion’s nebula, / the double star of Ursa Major, the hundreds in Andromeda’s cluster…” (43). It is April, and “we are dazzled dizzy, stumbling / as we find our way back in the dark, / tired as the light that has fallen on us, / coming from so many light years away” (43). This section ends with three intensely blue poems and, finally, “A fisherman / casts in the surf, / one more time, / a long silky filament, / the thread that still / joins me to you; / it snaps taut, then loosens, / and he pulls it back in” (51).
The last part returns to sugar, to mother as a hungry ghost longing for sweetness, which Crooker locates in embodied life. Of angels, she writes “We always long for what we don’t have, and they yearn to be incarnate, to know the hunger / of the tongue” (55).
Ireland is in the first poem of the collection, and we return there in a series of poems near the end, zigzagging time shaping space as well. What began in autumn with an invoice naming loss as the price of embodiment ends with a promise of spring: “at summer’s end, we find / what’s left, lurking in the leaves: / an enormous baseball bat flung / in the corner, abandoned, waiting / patiently for the seasons to whirl / around again, bringing the start / of spring training, the sun, ascending / like the letter A, rosy in the east” (69).
Writing on the south side of Chicago with October approaching fast, I find that abandonment, baseball, and patience in whirling seasons make a powerful case for spring training as an art of living hope in the face of loss. This book, infused with the whole spectrum of blue, is spring training, taking dandelions, sugar donuts, insalata caprese, zucchini, and baseball as the stuff of parables in which light breaks on a world of ordinary things.
Yes. Every body falls, words come down in the fabric of time; and there is light in this book, a shining lake of it, pure gold.
reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago
Barbara Crooker. Gold. Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2013. ISBN 978-1-62032-940-5.