Review by Claire Keyes

LINE DANCE by Barbara Crooker   Word Press P. O. Box 541106 Cincinnati, OH 45254-1106 78 pp., $17.00, paper www.word-press.com

"Come sway with us" invite Barbara Crooker's poems in Line Dance. In these musical, rhythmic poems, anyone might step in. No need for partners, no need to dance particularly well. Line dancing allows disparate individuals to get together in an exuberant whole, even, Crooker tells us in her title poem, the dead.
 
After her title poem, she begins Section I with several poems that summon the departed. In Blues for Karen, for example, she finds herself thinking about phoning Karen, "but the lines don't stretch to heaven." Instead she focuses upon some morning glories whose "tendrils...trellis upward, / hand over little green hand, so tenacious, / they hang on in any storm." Although fragile, the morning glories are hardy and determined. They might indeed reach heaven. Crooker stops herself from such fantasy by recognizing that "the season will snap shut like a purse / that this old blue world will keep on spinning, / without you."
 
Included in Line Dance is another unlikely dancer, Crooker's son David, an autistic child we learn about in The Knot Garden. Her son's brain, in contrast to migrating geese whose brains seem wired to bring them south, is "more circuitous: / two steps forward, one step back, a knot garden / where the possibilities diminish as the years / branch on." Crooker will come back to David in other poems, sometimes with the fear of what will happen to him when she's no longer there, other times as in Simile with recognition for his effect on her as a poet. Taken to see a play in New York, he likes "traffic lights and Don't Walk signs." She thanks him for calling her "attention / to the world's smallest minutia."
 
As an instance of this "minutia," Crooker's poem Eggplants takes this humble vegetable as subject. Written in the voice of eggplants, the poem invites readers to:

Cradle us in the palm of your hand,
solid and fleshy, glossy as satin
as we pull our black camisoles
over ample curves, rounded hips.

If part of the reason that we read poetry is to experience language as a sensuous pleasure, then these lines from Eggplants fully satisfy. Seldom has a vegetable been observed so attentively, so freshly. Crooker doesn't get seduced, however, by the lushness of her diction and imagery. The poem concludes with, of all things, a dance metaphor, but how appropriate:

We spring from the dirt in greenness
we return in dust and compost but oh, what
a lovely dance there is in between, bobbing
on spiky stems in the hot wind,
our wine-dark skin hot to the touch.
Come, sway with us, in the dark.

While she has a gift for discovering beauty in the ordinary, Crooker is not blind to the suffering in the world and sounds a note of deep sadness when the external, political world enters. On "a sweet June day," in Hard Bop towards the end of the volume, we find the poet "riffing along with the breeze, scatting / words, here and there, trying to make sense / of my life." Into this idyll comes "the news of the world..a car bomb...hundreds of lives...torn apart." She reaches out at this point to a line from Thomas Merton: "God is that bit / of diamond dust shining within each of us." No matter our experience, the quantities of grief or joy, we all share "scraps of star drift, our shared DNA," Crooker says. To her credit, she reaches for this shared sense of a common humanity, wants it, passionately, to make her life whole.
 
Closer to home than car bombs is her son and the shattering in his brain. Thus she follows "Hard Bop" with "Rhythm Section," featuring her son and his love for various instruments and the noises they make. He "loves his rain stick, turns it over / and over, hearing the small beans / rolling down their grooves." After his drum or the piano, "there are the small bells on a stick that he's shaking" which remind Crooker of goat bells or "the clear gold notes / in church, when a circle of wheat/ becomes the body of God, given for all of us, even for him." In this religious image, Crooker's last three words are heart-breaking in their banality and realism. If we are all God's children, as believers assert, then David must be included, is included, to make the exuberant whole that composes Crooker's universe.

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Claire Keyes developed a flair for line dancing while on trips to Greece. When not dancing, she takes up her pen to write poems, literary essays, book reviews and a daily journal. A quilter of amateur standing, she manages to follow a sometimes straight line to work a seam. Look for her poems on-line at tattoohighway.org, poemeleon.org and poetrymagazine.com. In print, her poems and reviews can be found in Calyx, the Anthology of New England Writers and Smartish Pace, among others. She lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts.