Slow Wreckage by Barbara Crooker
Grayson Books, 2024
“No one wants to hear about it,” Barbara Crooker begins her poem “On a Late Birthday”:
the body’s slow wreckage:
skin crackling like porcelain
left in the kiln too long…
We all know the end of the body’s story, and Crooker doesn’t spare us the catalogue of infirmities that lead up to it. What distinguishes her writing of them in poems like “Degenerative Disc Disorder,” “After Rotator Cuff Surgery,” and “After Oral Surgery,” from a tiresome listing of ailments is the beauty and wisdom Crooker makes of aging’s diminishments. In “Acupuncture,” her “back bristles, a human porcupine,” as she submits to the procedure, wanting her “fingers to return.” “But I must be blocked / in every meridian.” The poem ends with the doctor’s poetic prescription:
Open your heart
Like a many-petaled lotus.
Hope is the golden spine of the sun.
Over and over, the poems in Slow Wreckage open the heart of both speaker and reader, offering hope—not the facile hope that the body will reclaim its youthful beauty, strength, and health or that those lost to us will return. The poet knows that “[t]ime cannot run backwards, / no matter how hard we try” (“Pentimento”). Yet, if anyone can tell the unflinching truth about the pain, losses, and indignities of aging while making the reader hunger for more days to dwell in life’s delights, it’s Barbara Crooker.
Crooker’s ekphrastic poems have always been among her best, and that is certainly true here. Considering Matisse’s last fourteen years of work, “[w]hen his hands could no longer hold a brush,” and he “turned to paper and scissors…the liberation of shape / from paper,” the poet writes of her own left hand “mysteriously cramping, twisting like a snail in a shell (“Late Painters: Matisse”). And in its companion poem, “Une Seconde Vie,” she extends her connection with the painter beyond the physical. After quoting the painter saying of those last fourteen years “I have needed all that time to reach the state where I can say / what I wanted to say,” she ends the poem: “…I am climbing that last hill as well; / I hope I will be able to murmur those words when the darkness thickens.”
It’s not only the poet’s aging body in “slow wreckage” in these poems, but also our nation and the entire world. Responding to O’Keeffe’s painting Black and Purple Petunias #1 in a poem by the same title, she finds herself in “the rows / of [her] local farm stand” where, “needing some beauty in [her] life,” she buys petunias to “[tuck] into [her] perennial border. / Which is not guarded by a wall / or men with guns…” While armed men don’t appear in her garden, they’ve invaded the poem, a grim reminder that, beyond the petunias’ “extravagant perfume” lies tragedy.
And here I am, trying
to keep my ears open
to everybody’s song.
Climate change, corporate greed, and evil in politics are all part of the “slow wreckage” here.
Perhaps the most poignant of the more political poems in Slow Wreckage” is “U Pick” about picking raspberries and cherries among strangers.
…We all think we’re
in high heaven, after the long winter, later cold spring. If this
were a protest march, would a few be carrying opposite signs,
shouting invectives?
Yet, as they “[share} recipes, tips on preserves, and how to make / a good pie,” the poet supposes we all want to “bring some sweetness to our families, blinking our blind eyes in the multilingual light.” Although often evoked as evidence of life’s sweetness in Crooker’s poems, here food takes on the sense of communion, of a sacred commonality.
There is much of the elegiac in this collection, but it is also a celebration of beauty and hope, as well as, and especially, a manifesto for not giving up, as demonstrated in her villanelle in memory of poet Kim Bridgford, who, over and over, “rose above the fray: the bullshit, / faculty politics,” and “then cancer.” Like the relentless and beautiful repetitions in this villanelle, although “things were tough. You never quit.”
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Judith Sornberger’s full-length poetry collections are Open Heart (Calyx Books), Practicing the World (CavanKerry), I Call to You from Time (Wipf & Stock), and Angel Chimes: Poems of Advent and Christmas (Shanti Arts). Her six chapbooks include the award-winning Wal-Mart Orchid and her most recent, The Book of Muses (Finishing Line Press). She is a professor emerita of Mansfield University of Pennsylvania and lives on the side of a mountain outside Wellsboro, PA.