About this item
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, Czanne, 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.
About the Author
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.
