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Some Glad Morning: Poems (Pitt Poetry Series) Paperback – November 5, 2019

by Barbara Crooker (Author)
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 43 ratings
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Longlist, 2019 Julie Suk Prize for best poetry book published by a literary press

Some Glad Morning, Barbara Crooker’s ninth book of poetry, teeters between joy and despair, faith and doubt, the disconnect between lived experience and the written word. Primarily a lyric poet, Crooker is in love with the beauty and mystery of the natural world, even as she recognizes its fragility. But she is also a poet unafraid to write about the consequences of our politics, the great divide. She writes as well about art, with ekphrastic poems on paintings by Hopper, O’Keeffe, Renoir, Matisse, Cézanne, and others. Many of the poems are elegaic in tone, an older writer tallying up her losses. Her work embodies Bruce Springsteen’s dictum, “it ain’t no sin to be glad we’re alive,” as she celebrates the explosion of spring peonies, chocolate mousse, a good martini, hummingbirds’ flashy metallics, the pewter light of September, Darryl Dawkins (late NBA star), saltine crackers.  While she recognizes it might all be about to slip away, “Remember that nothing is ever lost,” she writes, and somehow, we do.
Previous page
  1. Part of series
    Pitt Poetry
  2. Print length
    110 pages
  3. Language
    English
  4. Publication date
    November 5, 2019
  5. Dimensions
    6 x 0.5 x 9 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0822965925
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0822965923
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“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
 

“Barbara Crooker's poems invite us into her garden, into castles and museums, into the rich complexity of life. Using language full of passion and metaphor, Crooker paints each line, like an artist, with precision and beauty. She celebrates even the smallest moment showing us that time is slippery as a silver fish. Cheers to Crooker's dry martinis, to her wit and wisdom, to this remarkable collection.” —Carol Was, poetry editor, The MacGuffin
 

“Crooker gives us permission to take pleasure in the world even when we feel there is no time or energy for such luxuries as gratitude and joy.” —Christian Century
 

“Read Barbara Crooker’s Some Glad Morning and be blown away by her exuberant use of language.” —Assisi
 

“Crooker is a master at ekphrastic poetry, and this book includes several fine examples. . . . Readers will understand that Crooker has been in love—with life, with art, with nature, with her family, and with words—for her whole life, and our lives are the richer for it.” —Poetry Porch
 

“Some Glad Morning is both a promise and a fulfillment: the ‘glad morning’ can be either now or in the past or future, but the notion encapsulates Barbara Crooker’s unique poetic mixture of longing and love.” —Valparaiso Poetry Review
 

About the Author

Barbara Crooker is the author of eight books of poetry, including Les Fauves and The Book of Kells. Her first book, Radiance, won the 2005 Word Press First Book Award and was finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize; Line Dance, her second book, won the 2009 Paterson Award for Excellence in Literature. Crooker is a poetry editor for Italian Americana and has received a number of awards, including the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies.
 

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ University of Pittsburgh Press; 1st edition (November 5, 2019)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 110 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0822965925
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0822965923
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 4.8 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.5 x 9 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 43 ratings

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Barbara Crooker

Barbara Crooker

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Barbara Crooker’s poems have appeared in magazines such as The Green Mountains Review, Poet Lore, The Potomac Review, The Hollins Critic, The Christian Science Monitor, Smartish Pace, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Nimrod, The Denver Quarterly, The Tampa Review, Poetry International, The Christian Century, America, and anthologies such as The Bedford Introduction to Literature, Good Poems for Hard Times (Garrison Keillor, editor), and Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania. She is the recipient of the Pen and Brush Poetry Prize, the Ekphrastic Poetry Award from Rosebud, the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Pennsylvania Center for the Book Poetry in Public Places Poster Competition, the 2003 Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, the "April Is the Cruelest Month" Award from Poets & Writers, the New Millenium Writing's Y2K competition, the 1997 Karamu Poetry Award, and others, including three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, eighteen residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; two residencies at the Moulin à Nef, Auvillar, France; and two residencies at The Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annaghmakerrig, Ireland. A forty-four time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and five time nominee for Best of the Net, she was nominated for the 1997 Grammy Awards for her part in the audio version of the popular anthology, Grow Old Along With Me—The Best is Yet to Be (Papier Mache Press). Her books are Radiance, which won the 2005 Word Press First Book competition and was a finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize; Line Dance (Word Press 2008), which won the 2009 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence; More (C&R Press 2010); Gold (Cascade Books, a division of Wipf and Stock, in their Poeima Poetry Series, 2013); Small Rain (Purple Flag, an imprint of the Virtual Artists Collective, 2014); Barbara Crooker: Selected Poems (FutureCycle Press, 2015); Les Fauves (C&R Press, 2017); The Book of Kells (Cascade Books, a division of Wipf and Stock, in their Poeima Poetry Series, 2019); Some Glad Morning (Pitt Poetry Series, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019). Her poetry has been read on the BBC, the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Company), and by Garrison Keillor on The Writer's Almanac, and in Ted Kooser's column, American Life in Poetry. She has read her poems in the Poetry at Noon series at the Library of Congress, in Auvillar, France, at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, the SoCal Poetry Festival, the Festival of Faith and Writing, Poetry by the Sea, and in many other venues.

Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5 out of 5
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Top reviews from the United States

Tom Romano
5.0 out of 5 stars Barbara Crooker Masterpiece
Reviewed in the United States on November 6, 2019
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Some Glad Morning is a gem. Barbara Crooker’s newest book (2019) is, for me, her best among her many fine books. I found myself bending down page corners so that later I could easily locate poems I especially liked. I finally had to stop—I was bending down the corner of every page!
Crooker means for us to slow down, to take close, appreciative looks around us in our one wild and precious lives, as Mary Oliver put it.
“All we have are these moments,” Crooker writes: “the golden trees, / the industrious bees, the falling light. Darkness / will not overtake us.”
Crooker finds meaning in what many overlook: eggplant, late September light, a dry martini. She makes her meanings with simple, luxurious language that astonishes: “yellow light of butter sinking fast on rye toast,” “Night’s vast black locomotive,” “the mockingbird letting loose his vocals, a Fort Knox of sound.”
There is also a delightfully devilish playfulness that slips through now and then. In “Home Cooking” Crooker writes in the final lines, “. . . if you need to take the chill off, baby, / I might be able to dish a little something up . . . .”
And for those of us who write poems, even just now and then, or induce others to write them, Crooker provides a recipe: “. . . go shopping in the grocery aisle / of your own experience.” Which strikes me as good advice for anyone learning to write.
Crooker longs to be useful: “In a world that seems poised / for disaster, where what we’ve taken for granted /no longer seems given, I want to be a nail, a screw, / a brad, a fastener, something that holds things / together, even as it’s all about to fall apart.”
These poems are useful. They ground you in what matters. They provide insight, pleasure, and solace against that vast black locomotive. I’ll be rereading them, bent down page corners and all.
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Graypeonies
5.0 out of 5 stars Concise, precise, lucid and luminous: one masterful poem after another
Reviewed in the United States on February 23, 2020
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Barbara Crooker’s latest collection, Some Glad Morning, ought to fly away (as the song says) right off the bookshelves, and fly off from here to your checkout cart. I’ve been reading Crooker’s poems for more than a decade, and the poems collected herein are among her very best. They are richly textured and dense with metaphors and other figures of speech so imagination seeps in all around the edges of keen perceptions and tightly-stitched thoughts. Any tenderhearted soul would warm to the subject matter — seasons, weathers, changing light, the flowers and fauna of the garden and those discovered further afield, meditations on works of great (and lesser) art, loss, and near-loss, and love (and cooking!) — but subject matter is foundational, and what a poet makes of the matter, is where technical mastery and genius comes into play. It is in this “making of” that Crooker exceeds. The poems are concise, precise, lucid, and luminous, and so dense, it’s almost incomprehensible: how, one asks, do you become so skilled that you can shape thoughts into such a compact ‘machine with wings’? Years and years and practice, and of thinking critically about the making, then letting that thinking shape one’s practice. In one poem, Crooker writes, “I wanted to do more in this life,/not the elusive prizes, but poems that astonish”: she’s done that in spades! Every poet eventually writes a poem of poetic election, and “Commission” is Crooker’s. In it she surmises, “I think my job is to sit here, polished/by the sun, and let the clock of the world unwind.” Yep. And thank goodness that’s what she’s granted herself the grace to do because the poems that have arisen are truly blessings.
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Angela Patten
5.0 out of 5 stars The Pleasures of Poetry
Reviewed in the United States on December 23, 2019
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In Some Glad Morning, poet Barbara Crooker dishes up a saucy serving of poems that remind us, again and again, of the pleasures of the flesh. From single malt scotch and beer with oysters to the velvet skin of a ripe peach in August and, above all, the delights of a dry martin, these skillfully crafted poems celebrate all that is beautiful and fleeting in our everyday lives. Crooker doesn’t hesitate to mention the horrors of war, the lies that the government speaks, or the many tragedies of our lives, but these are not her focus. Instead, she draws our attention to “a jay, a pure blue verb/landing on the feeder” or “the way a song lingers/long after the bird is gone.” These poems will linger and continue to reward repeated readings.
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Kindle Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Another Wonderful Book from Barbara Crooker
Reviewed in the United States on July 29, 2020
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Reading Barbara Crooker’s poems is always a delight, a treat for the senses, and she has great ending lines. Crooker’s poems take on being against the mundane. She wants the nectar out of the simplest joys in everyday life. She also knows she can have the love of one good man, but not tango with the hard-body shirtless guy who has come to cut down her locus tree. Her poems are heartwarming, full of wit, and wisdom. She takes on the daily struggles and worldly struggles, both past and present. If you buy this book, you won’t be disappointed. Some Glad Morning is part of the Pitt Poetry Series, which is known for its quality.
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Curious Mind
5.0 out of 5 stars A delight
Reviewed in the United States on January 14, 2020
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In her latest collection, Barbara Crooker displays in abundance the mastery of craft and appreciation of the natural world that characterize her previous work. These poems speak of life’s pleasures and griefs in a voice at once specific and universal. Among my favorites are those inspired by food and drink (“Fifteen Been Soup, “Martini,” “Tutti-Frutti”) and by Hopper and Matisse paintings. “…our days in the sun are brief,” Crocker knows, but the knowledge doesn’t keep her from celebrating them. Rich in empathy and intelligence, Some Glad Morning is a delight to read and re-read.
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Juditha Dowd
5.0 out of 5 stars Both passionate and grounded, poems that sing of life.
Reviewed in the United States on February 19, 2020
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Ever alert to the pleasures of nature—the flower bombs of spring, the endless repertoire of a mocking bird—in Some Glad Morning Barbara Crooker also treats us to the pleasures of hearth, body and spirit. Few poets today write as seductively about food and drink—the pleasures of the table, the comforts of sustenance. Whether interrogating a painting for an ekphrastic poem, or interrogating memory with an understanding enhanced by age and distance, Crooker peers clear-eyed through life’s darker moments and beyond them finds light. These poems reminds us to enjoy enjoy enjoy, when and while we can.
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