Review of Les Fauves by Barbara Crooker
by Marilyn L. Taylor
arbara Crooker, a poet widely known for her breathtaking perspectives on
the visual arts, presents an entirely new range of them in her latest and
possibly most eclectic collection. The book, titled Les Fauves
(after a group of innovative French painters), transports the reader to the
turn of a newly remote century-the twentieth-by way of some highly
unconventional artworks.

These poems are followed by others motivated by unrelated subject-matters
and sensibilities that range from variations on the sonnet to playful
poetic puzzles and riddles. We even get an unexpected glimpse of a feisty
21st century jeune fille who tends to express herself in
quirky monorhymes—sardonic, sexy, cerebral, and not one bit afraid of a
rhyme that links I'm so hot and guy with a yacht-the sort of
thing that Stevie Smith might have dashed off a generation or two earlier.
The reader's initial point of departure, however, has to do primarily with fin de siècle French art, and the innovations of the artists
dubbed "Les Fauves" ("wild beasts") by some of their contemporaries.
Several of them later became luminaries in the annals of Western art.
Crooker knows these artists well. She is aware, for example, that in 1926,
one of the most prominent of them—Henri Matisse—completed a dazzling
painting that owes much to the influence of his early alliance with Les
Fauves. The painting is is titled, perhaps disingenuously, Figure Decorative sur Fond Ornemental ("Decorative Figure on
Ornamental Background"). As Crooker describes it in her poem of the same
name, we are directed first to the presence of a voluptuous young woman in
the center-foreground. The poet speculates, quite reasonably:
You might be looking at her globed breasts
or the round bread basket of her belly…
but we quickly come to understand that this delectable female figure is not
intended to be the sole focus of the painting. On the contrary, her
presence represents just one among several decorative elements in "a
striking collection of them, all carefully arranged against a gorgeously
flamboyant background. As Crooker puts it:
…her curves repeat themselves in the lobed gold
borders of the the wallpaper, the decorative motifs
in the rug on the floor…
As if to encourage this interpretation, Crooker further points out that
Matisse has strategically seated his model beside an appealing bowl of
lemons, or "citron suns," to which she pointedly draws our
attention. "You can almost smell the oil on your hands," she
suggests, "feel the yellow curdle in your mouth." We find ourselves
persuaded to step back, to look beyond the iconic young woman, and to
experience the richness of the painting as a whole, lemons and all, with
all of our senses.
This ability to transform the reader from mere observer into
quasi-participant calls for a rare combination of artistry and ingenuity on
the poet's part. Crooker rises to that challenge again and again in these
pages. Another example is her unusual take on André Derain's
exuberantly colored work titled The Turning Road, L'Estaque (1906).
Critics have solemnly described this undulating orange and green townscape
as "intense," "audacious," and "scorching,"-but when we examine it through
Crooker's eyes it becomes playful, even slightly wacky. She begins the poem
with "Here the banana peel road slips down to the sea,"— and ends it
with a cheerful proposal:
Let's commit an act of spontaneous
combustion. Let's all go down
in flames.
And why not? agrees the reader, who leaves the art gallery
satisfied, ready to be surprised by some completely different poetic
approaches.
For example, one of Crooker's most successful non-ekphrastic strategies is
based on finding hidden poems in the pages of dictionaries, thesauruses,
grammar-and-usage texts, and even among the letters of the alphabet. With a
straight face, Crooker saddles one of the latter with the improbable title
"The Bossy Letter R", which begins with the following deadpan prediction:
The bossy letter R will turn you crooked,
just when you were sure your goose
was merely cooked…
followed by a string of equally punny takes on the irascible letter R. The poem closes with a summary of the potential havoc an "R" is
able to wreak:
beware; on some dark night it'll
hot-wire your cat, tuning its motor,
start it turning: rrrrrrrrrrrr.
Elsewhere, the reader will be delightfully flummoxed by an abecedarian
called "This American Life" Here the letters of the alphabet engage in a
dizzy spin through the 1950s, from A (Annette Funicello) to Z (zirconia,
the famously fake "diamond"). A few pages on, Crooker creates a
spinoff on a familiar homework assignment for English class—an essay that
sets out to "compare and contrast." As she remembers it:
When I was an undergraduate, I thought it
would be brilliant to write my compare &
contrast paper on the Maidenform three-way stretch
girdle and the three branches of the US government:
executive, legislative and judicial…
Using that unlikely premise, she is somehow able to expand the poem enough
to incorporate "control and flexibility", "checks and balances", "power
panels" and even "breathable mesh" into the narrative. No small feat for
the novice writer of essays—nor for the government, as a matter of fact.
It's a possibility, of course, that readers whose sensibilities lean toward
the curmudgeonly might find these pursuits frivolous, or perhaps even
unbecoming to a poet of Crooker's stature. In her capable hands, though,
what seems to be merely a lexical game can turn into something unexpectedly
cerebral. The following is an excerpt from one of the more memorable of
these, a words-within-words poem titled "Word Search":
This day draws the story in desultory,
the slow plodding narrative of the snow.
It takes apart collection, finds the low
haunting notes of a cello within.
The word-play here is apparent, but never overdone; Crooker has employed
just enough of it to keep the reader attuned to every word.
The closing pages of this remarkable book pay a return visit to the annals
of art, focusing on a variety of paintings created in the late 19 th century and well into the 20th, All of them, to a
greater or lesser degree, summon the Fauvist painters, but perhaps more
distantly. These include works by Raoul Dufy and Henri-Edmond Cross, among
others, as well as several works by Vincent Van Gogh, whose
post-impressionistic style had been integral to the founding of Les Fauves.
Several of these poems focus on Van Gogh's work from the 1880s, which she
describes (in a poem titled "Ink") with a discernment that moves well
beyond the merely descriptive:
He cross-hatched the patchwork fields
of Arles, the farmhouses and gardens
of Auvers, trees in winter, the scratchy
awns of wheat fields. These were the bones
of the paintings, the things that came before.
A poetic odyssey from Vincent's "bones" to the unfettered extravagances of
Les Fauves to Matisse's innovations from a slightly later season is what
Barbara Crooker opens up to us here. It is a journey well worth taking.
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