Barbara Crooker's sixth collection of poetry, Small Rain, is an exploration of the wheel of the year, the seasons that roll in a continuous circle and yet move inexorably forward. Here, gorgeous lyric poems praise poppies, mockingbirds, nectarines, mulch and compost, yet loss (stillbirth, cancer, emphysema), with its crow-black wings, is also always present. In poems that narrow in on the particular ("a cardinal twangs his notes of cheer; he has no truck with irony and post- / modernism"), poems that focus on aging and the body ("how many springs are left on my ticket?"), poems that open out...
Barbara Crooker's sixth collection of poetry, Small Rain, is an exploration of the wheel of the year, the seasons that roll in a continuous circle and...
Poetry. Art. Women's Studies. LES FAUVES is, as the title suggests, a collection of ekphrastic poetry, meditations on paintings from the Fauve and Post-Impressionist movements. But it also contains poetry's equivalent to Fauvism, poems that take a walk on the wild side. There are language experiment poems, poems of word play, poems in form both usual (end rhymes, sonnets, ghazals) and unusual (abecedaries, traditional, embedded, and double helix), palindromes, anagrams, and word scrambles. Crazy word salad poems. Crooker's subjects range widely, from living and working in a small village in...
Poetry. Art. Women's Studies. LES FAUVES is, as the title suggests, a collection of ekphrastic poetry, meditations on paintings from the Fauve and Pos...
