Gold
- Arts & Literature
- Publisher: Cascade Books (Wipf and Stock)
- Published: 2013
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Publisher's Description
Barbara Crooker's new book Gold focuses on one of the most profound life-altering experiences possible: losing one's mother. This collection is an elegy, not just to the speaker's mother, but to a lost Eden that cannot be reclaimed. Beginning with a series of lyrics set in autumn, the poems become more narrative, recounting the long illness of Crooker's mother, her death, and the profound journey along the shores of grief. Throughout, Crooker is aware of the complexity and strength of the mother/daughter relationship and the chasm that this loss opens. The book includes other themes: poems about aging and the body, the loss of friends, the difficulties and joys in a long-term marriage, and always, the subtle ways faith influences the way Crooker experiences life. Her work has great scope, spanning the globe from rural Pennsylvania to Ireland, and reaching not just within herself but also outside of herself, to ekphrastic poems on the paintings of Gorky, Manet, Matisse, and others. This is the book of a mature writer, one who demonstrates an awareness of our own impermanence, our brokenness, and one who knows that if our parents go before us, we will have to learn to live with loss. In this book, we see the redemptive power of poetry itself to heal and to console.
Endorsements (4)
“Gold invoices the losses and worries of the last third of our lives: the deaths of old friends, the illness and deaths of parents, the breakdown of our own trusted bodies. And yet there is the abiding grace here of those moments when the plenitude of the world is incarnate in Crooker's elegant, accessible, and keenly observed poems.”
“This collection of poems is pure gold, filled with the gold of fall, of leaf, of goldenrod, of Frost's 'nothing gold can stay,' of money, even of golden oils skimming the surface of a stew. . . . These compelling poems offer glimpses of the holy present in the natural world, in human love between child and mother, between wife and husband, and in living and dying.”
“It's gold, all right: Barbara Crooker's voice up close to us, the readers, catching colloquial glints. 'I'll show you what's really liquid,' she confides in a poem about the stock market crash. 'It's sunlight.' While acknowledging the truth of pain, in poem after poem Crooker puts her remarkable gift for metaphor at the service of praise.”
“In the woods and gardens of Barbara Crooker's poetry, 'the leaves go presto chango,' and so will you. I return to her poems for their magic of comfort in times of loss, for assurance that sweets remain and grow. She is the bird that stays to sing throughout the night when all the others have left for the winter.”
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