Some Glad Morning

Barbara Crooker's admiration and affection for visual art, as evidenced in numerous ekphrastic poems, is witnessed in the vividly descriptive—perhaps painterly—vocabulary she exhibits throughout Some Glad Morning. Indeed, she also frequently seems to ‘speak in the tongues of flowers' with a lyrical language borrowed from elements of the physical world around her, especially when displaying human interaction with aspects of nature, food, music, and those others for whom we care and with whom we share these gifts. Consequently, Crooker's colorfully textured and sensitively expressive poetry always offers delight to readers' eyes and ears."" - Edward Byrne, editor, Valparaiso Poetry Review

""'Darkness / will not overtake us,' insists Barbara Crooker, who writes poems of deep happiness. How untrendy! one might say. Where's the political? Where's grief? They're here too, underpinning these poems, but not allowed governance. ‘O / day! You are the antidote / to the bitter news of the world.' If we have only one life, better to enjoy each glad morning, and some evenings too: ‘So let me lean back in this red Adirondack / chair as dusk makes us all equal, happy for the blend / of herbs and gin, pure sapphire, the dividend of olive / at the end.' Like Edward Hopper, one of the artists whose work Crooker inhabits in these pages, her ‘subject is light,' interior as well as exterior, and the birds and trees and humans who revel in it."" - Michael Waters