Barbara Crooker*

Barbara Crooker is a Pennsylvania poet whose poems have been well-received by many who know the artform well. They’ve been featured many times on The Writer’s Almanac as read by Garrison Keillor — and for The Slowdown podcast, read by then U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith.

I was pleased to see Barbara, along with other friends from our tight-knit poetry community, at the Festival of Faith and Writing in April. She gave me a copy of her tenth book, Slow Wreckage which had just appeared from Grayson Books. Her other recent books include: Some Glad Morning (University of Pittsburgh Press) and The Book of Kells (Poiema/Cascade) which was honoured as the Best Poetry Book of 2018 from Poetry by the Sea.

She has won numerous other awards including the Paterson Award for Literary Excellence, the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and she is a sixty-one time nominee for the Pushcart Prize.

The following poem first appeared in my web-journal Poems For Ephesians — and is from Slow Wreckage.

Sonnet From The Ephesians

----- — Ephesians 1:16

I do not cease to give thanks, especially in November
even as we lose an hour of light, drawing
the curtains at 4:30 to keep out the cold. To remember
you are dust seems appropriate now. Crows are cawing
black elegies in the bare trees. Just past the Day of the Dead,
and I’m thankful for every friend who has blessed
my life, gold coins in a wooden chest. Who said
no man is an island? We’re all peninsulas, I guess,
joined to the mainland, part of the shore. We’re the sticks
in the bundle that can’t be broken. Even if
it doesn’t seem that way, the bickering of politics,
the blather on the nightly news. Maybe we speak in hieroglyphs,
unclear, always missing the mark? So let me be plain.
I’m grateful for the days of sun. I’m grateful for the rain.

Posted with permission of the poet.

*This is the fourth Kingdom Poets post about Barbara Crooker: first post, second post, third post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Cascade) ― a book of poems written from the point-of-view of angels. His books are available through Wipf & Stock.

Barbara Crooker*

Barbara Crooker is a Pennsylvania poet who has just had her eighth poetry collection, The Book of Kells, published, as part of the Poiema Poetry Series from Cascade Books. It is, of course, inspired by the ninth century manuscript of the four Gospels known as The Book of Kells: “Ireland's greatest cultural treasure and the world's most famous medieval manuscript.”

She received a writing fellowship at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, County Monaghan, Ireland. While in Ireland she meditated on pages of the Book of Kells in the Long Library, Trinity College, Dublin. She also remotely studied various pages which are now accessible online.

The Book of Kells is the second Barbara Crooker book I have been fortunate enough to edit with her. She has also had a poem recently appear in my new web-journal Poems For Ephesians, which is on the McMaster Divinity College website.

The following poem first appeared in Presence, and is from The Book of Kells.

Trinity College, the Book of Kells

10/19/13 page of the day: Portrait of St. John, folio 291v and 292r

In a dim room, the Gospel of John rises, pure gold
in the gloom: In the beginning was the word,
and the word was made flesh. John’s seated
on a throne of ultramarine, haloed
in plaits of light. He’s my tribe, a scribe,
notebook in one hand, pen in the other. Around him,
tattooed in vellum, interlace knots, no beginning
or end. The more I stare in this darkness,
the less I see, patterns too small for my retinae,
these aging eyes. Made from pigments of verdigris,
orpiment, lampblack and woad, is it a vision,
or merely a dream? Metalwork or woven ribbons,
this is the universe recast as pattern, and I draw in
a breath, Word of God on my tongue.

*This is the third Kingdom Poets post about Barbara Crooker: first post, second post, fourth post.

Posted with permission of the poet.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection is Ampersand (2018, Cascade). His books are available through Amazon, and Wipf & Stock, including the anthologies The Turning Aside, and Adam, Eve, & the Riders of the Apocalypse.

Anya Krugovoy Silver*

Anya Krugovoy Silver (1968—2018) is a prolific poet, perhaps best known for writing boldly and honestly about her battle with inflammatory breast cancer. She was recently named a Guggenheim fellow for poetry for 2018. I was informed of her death last week, within the first 24 hours. I still feel shock, as she had just been sharing with me about various projects she was working on — including a review of my anthology, Adam, Eve, & the Riders of the Apocalypse, and a new poetry collection.

She participated in the Poiema Poetry reading at the Festival of Faith & Writing in Grand Rapids in April, as pictured below, and will be very missed by the circle of fine poets — including Julie Moore, Barbara Crooker, Tania Runyan, and Marjorie Maddox — who count her as a friend.

The following poem is from her fourth and most-recent book, Second Bloom, which I am honoured to have edited for the Poiema Poetry Series (Cascade Books).

Fourth Advent

On Sunday, I lie beside a friend in bed,
weeping, because she doesn’t want a better place.
How bleak the next life to her grieving sons,
who need their mother here, on earth—
her silly wigs, her marathons, her fingers
deftly pinching dumplings for the feast.
For our sins, it’s said that Christ was born.
The manger’s set up in the church,
my friend sleeps through her steroid pills.
The nights grow still. We wait, Emmanuel.
Merciful one, begotten of woman, understand
how difficult it is to trust that you are kind.

Here is Anya's obituary from Friday's New York Times.

*This is the third Kingdom Poets post about Anya Krugovoy Silver: first post, second post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection is Ampersand (2018, Cascade). His books are available through Amazon, and Wipf & Stock, including the anthologies The Turning Aside, and Adam, Eve, & the Riders of the Apocalypse.

Barbara Crooker*

Barbara Crooker's latest poetry collection Gold (2013) is part of the Poiema Poetry Series from Cascade Books. Many journals, such as The Cresset and Green Mountains Review, and many anthologies including Good Poems for Hard Times (Viking Penguin), have published her work. She has been honoured with several awards, including the 2003 Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and she has been nominated thirty-two times for the Pushcart Prize.

Every year, I send out a selected poem for Advent to friends. These are among a series that Barbara Crooker sent to me, in return, last December.

Solstice

These are dark times. Rumors of war
rise like smoke in the east. Drought
widens its misery. In the west, glittering towers
collapse in a pillar of ash and dust. Peace,
a small white bird, flies off in the clouds.

And this is the shortest day of the year.
Still, in almost every window,
a single candle burns,
there are tiny white lights
on evergreens and pines,
and the darkness is not complete.

Nativity

In the dark divide of mid-December
when the skies are heavy, when the wind comes down
from the north, feathers of snow on its white breath,
when the days are short and the nights are cold,
we reach the solstice, nothing outside moving.
It’s hard to believe in the resurrection
of the sun, its lemony light, hard to remember
humidity, wet armpits, frizzy hair.
Though the wick burns black and the candle flickers,
love is born in the world again, in the damp
straw, in some old barn.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Barbara Crooker: first post, third post, fourth post.

Posted with permission of the poet.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection, Conspiracy of Light: Poems Inspired by the Legacy of C.S. Lewis, is available from Wipf & Stock as is his earlier award-winning collection, Poiema.

Barbara Crooker

Barbara Crooker lives in Pennsylvania, and is the author of four poetry books; her most recent collection, Gold (2013), is the fifth book in the Poiema Poetry Series from Cascade Books. She has also published ten poetry chapbooks. Her poems have appeared widely in such publications as Beloit Poetry Journal and The Christian Century — have received awards such as the 2009 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence for her second collection, Line Dance — and have been heard on BBC Radio and on Garrison Keillor’s The Writers Almanac.

Important subjects in Crooker’s verse include reflections on the natural world, and ekphrastic poems inspired by visual artists, including Georgia O’Keefe, and Arshile Gorky. Many poems in Gold are drawn from Crooker’s experience with her mother’s decline and eventual death.

The following poem is from her new collection, Gold, which I had the privilege to edit for publication.

Late Prayer

It’s not that I’m not trying
to love the world and everything
in it, but look, that includes people
who shoot up schools, not just the blue
bird in his coat of sky, his red & white vest,
or the starry asters speckling the field—
It has to include talk show hosts
and all their blather, men with closed
minds and hard hearts, not only this sky,
full of clouds as a field of sheep,
or this wind, pregnant with rain. Don’t
I have enough in my life; what is this
wild longing? Is there more to this world
than the shining surfaces? Will I be strong
enough to row across the ocean of loss
when my turn comes to take the oars?

Posted with permission of the poet.

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about Barbara Crooker: second post, third post, fourth post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca

Tania Runyan

Tania Runyan is an Illinois poet who has published one chapbook (which won Book of the Year by the Conference on Christianity and Literature in 2007) and two full-length collections. Her most recent book, A Thousand Vessels (2011, WordFarm), is divided into ten sections — one for each of ten different women from the Bible. Its predecessor Simple Weight is also concerned with the Biblical narrative — particularly with the beatitudes. Barbara Crooker said of that collection, "The poems have weight—emotional, spiritual, political—but are anything but simple."

The title of her new collection comes significantly from a poem about Christ’s mother: “Mary at Calvary”:
--------“God creates women for no reason
--------but grief. He can’t cry himself
--------and needs a thousand vessels for his tears...”
The following poem, also comes from the section relating to Mary in A Thousand Vessels.

Mary at the Nativity

The angel said there would be no end
to his kingdom. So for three hundred days
I carried rivers and cedars and mountains.
Stars spilled in my belly when he turned.

Now I can’t stop touching his hands,
the pink pebbles of his knuckles,
the soft wrinkle of flesh
between his forefinger and thumb.
I rub his fingernails as we drift
in and out of sleep. They are small
and smooth, like almond petals.
Forever, I will need nothing but these.

But all night, the visitors crowd
around us. I press his palms to my lips
in silence. They look down in anticipation,
as if they expect him
to spill coins from his hands
or raise a gold scepter
and turn swine into angels.

Isn’t this wonder enough
that yesterday he was inside me,
and now he nuzzles next to my heart?
That he wraps his hand around
my finger and holds on?

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about Tania Runyan: second post, third post.

Posted with permission of the poet.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca