Vernal Calibrations

  

 

Details:
Paperback: 96 Pages
Publisher: Red Dancefloor Press (1992)
Language: English
ISBN: 1-881168-01-8

 

 

 

G.W. Kroeker’s lyrical-wise Vernal Calibrations makes a melancholic magic of Life’s many important, yet often overlooked, moments.  Contemplatively concerned interpretations of what is right and wrong in man and nature, these poems should surely comfort, as they call forth, the most weary of world watchers.

                                                                                                Joan Jobe Smith,
                                                                                                Founding Editor of Pearl

 It is a real pleasure to see someone who is concerned about line breaks, strong images and language in general.

                                                                                                Jeff Vetoc,
                                                                                                Green Zero

 In an age seemingly preoccupied with sense and “nonsense,” how refreshing to find a poet with an ear still sensitive to the nuances of sound and movement.

G.W. Kroeker’s sinuous and lyrical poetry harkens back to the foundations of modernist poetic traditions, and in that return he finds great beauty and pain in the hard division of man into natural and artificial.  A very moving collection that speaks to all who love, suffer and rejoice in what life delivers.

                                                                                                Daniel Calder,
                                                                                                UCLA

Book Review

G.W. Kroeker’s superb masters of form, imagery, and language in no way detracts from the passionate, sensual, earthy content of his poetry.  Vernal Calibrations is about nature—man and nature, since the two cannot be separated, as Kroeker makes abundantly clear in most of these 58 poems.  In the title poem, he starts off with a bang:

                        Spring,
                        like a green haze,
                        hugs the branches
                        of sweetgum and ash,
                        drapes hillsides
                        In beryline mist,
                        settles in hollow and bog
                        a jade fog—
                        everywhere
                        the patina of life.

                        Startling,
                        the green foreshadowing,
                        for only yesterday the gray
                        earth extended such cold comfort.

                       Once again
                        I must contend with rising sap,
                        with blood and pulse,
                        heart and spleen.

The son of an Oklahoma dirt farmer, Kroeker knows well of what he writes.  He is as rooted to the earth as a tree; the cycles and seasons control his very soul—a welcome, yet mixed, blessing.  In “Somewhere There is Autumn,” he writes of Southern California:

                        . . . The temperature nudges
                        ninety, and surfers leave their wet
                        suits home to walk upon the waves.
                       Can a body soak up so much sun
                        without an autumn easing into
                        winter, without a winter stopping
                        everything that needs a rest?
                        Will it be the lack of autumn
                        that finally does us in, and not
                        the smog or crime or lassitude?

Although Kroeker is now a poetry consultant for the Advanced Placement Program of the College Board and lives in the San Gabriel Valley, urban life cannot erase his early years: his passion for all that is not man-made and his concern for its survival.  In “Roadside Supper in Yucatan,” he describes the swoop of an enormous buzzard narrowly missing his braking car:

                       Would he so willingly
                       have set upon the brilliance
                       of that roadside supper,
                       chanced the quick
                       prick of a toxic
                       Temper, had reptilian
                       dreams not long ago
                       been crushed
                       by truck or bus?

Kroeker’s more personal poems range from tender and beautifully understated to delightfully colloquial.  In one he describes his newly-wedded parents:

                       To his worldly goods he introduces her in turn,
                        Lady, Queen, and Paint,
                        his thick, cracked fingers,
                        the one with the new band catching the last light,
                        touch the velvet noses one by one,
                        and she can name the colt.

                        She ignores the gritty wind that presses
                        the second hand thinness of dress
                        between her thighs
                        and a dust that swirls.

In another, he writes of a woman so impossibly perfect she scatters rainbows throughout the house, hums Scarlatti when caught in freeway traffic jams, and passes lotus blossoms into the toilet:

                       What I wouldn’t give
                        to see her shit
                        just once
                        the crumpled bumper
                        of a Sixty Edsel.

Much of Kroeker’s poetry, however, ends on a more melancholy note: the distance he cannot close between himself and those he loves; his father’s fear of Depression poverty passed on to him, even when the freezer is full; the possibility that death may hold neither horror nor delight; and Man’s futile attempt to escape or ignore the central theme of Vernal Calibrations, of Kroeker’s life, and whether or not we know it, of our own.  The reader need not believe in astrology to identify with the words of “Tidal Force”:

                        The moon pulls tides and blood,
                        the hurly sun keeps planets
                        fixed in place and at their pace,
                        binary stars dance their reel
                        of orbital mass and galaxies hurl
                        themselves toward those that they repel;
                        and at the farthest edge of time
                        the ancients whirl and wheel
                        in stellar flight against
                        the moment they began.  Here
                        in the stillness, I feel the tug
                        of the faintest far-flung star . . .

If humans understood and acknowledged, as G.W. Kroeker so articulately does, their proper place in the scheme of things, the future of the earth and life upon it would be assured.

                                                                                                      Catherine Lynn,
                                                                                                      from Pearl Reviews

 

A Darkness Defined

    

 

 

Details:
Paperback: 92 pages
Publisher:  Red  Dancefloor Press (1994)
Language: English
ISBN: 1-881168-14-X

 

 

 
The Advice of “No Loving Beyond”—that there is no love that does not originate in flesh, in bone and cell, in the body undivided from a passion for “the rank/tangle of river bottoms”—is advice reflected in each of these provocative poems.  They are grounded in the physical, set in an earthy yet shapely music—blooming in a darkness defined by the loving light of the poet’s mind.

                                                                                                Carol Muske,
                                                                                                University of Southern California

This new collection displays a poetry that is unique, one that does not fit into any school or geography.  These sensitive, well-crafted poems touch deeply but differently, and as with Kroeker’s earlier work, they are filled with music.  These pages offer the contemporary lyric at its best.

                                                                                                Colin Winslow,
                                                                                                Rome

A consistently strong poetic voice underlying the variety of his subjects and tones.  He can quietly provoke and stun us into contemplation and awareness with his refusal to leave us in too traditional a lyric mood.  In this volume, as in Vernal Calibrations, Kroeker does what Helen Vendler called “the stoical and informed work of disciplining feeling into poetic form.”

                                                                                                Sidney Krome,
                                                                                                Coppin State College

G.W. Kroeker brings his pen to the “slow dance” of human experience, acutely attuned to the cries and silences of the natural world, where the hyacinth waits to break through the snow, and where his “dark archaic grammar” reminds us “that there is no loving beyond/the earth . . .”  His is a poetry of much precision and economy that seeks—and often finds—the center and the heart of things.

                                                                                                Brian Boldt, Editor
                                                                                                Green Fuse Poetry

Book Review

It is both easy and difficult to write about G.W. Kroeker’s new collection of poetry, A Darkness Defined: easy because the poetry is exciting and thought-provoking; difficult because it is challenging and highly charged, spiritually and poetically.

What captures best for me the sense of Kroeker’s poetry are three concepts of the very nature of poetry itself: the ancient Greek idea that writing poetry is making something (poiein), the German idea that it is compressing something (dichten), and Helen Vendler’s idea that it is doing “the stoical and informed work of disciplining feeling into . . . form.”

For Kroeker’s poems are nothing if not well-crafted, well made pieces of work, the work of the hands of feeling and intellect.  The opening of “Nature’s Score,” for example, gives a strong sense of Kroeker’s careful attention to the details of language, rhythm, and image critical to his poetry: “Limp in the blunt/hooked beak,/the dead mouse/hangs, dinner/for the owl.”  Something as small as a single comma (between “hangs” and “dinner”) effectively both separates and joins the jarring, Hopkins-like sprung rhythm and the hard crunching consonants of the first three lines (“blunt/hooked beak) with the slower rhythm and softer sounds of that last line and a half (“...dinner/for the owl”).  And we are left with the startling image of the reality of nature and life.

This is the main focus of Kroeker’s poetry: to awaken us from yawning indifference, to jar us into awareness, to help us see that life is possessed of both harsh reality and incredible wonder.  Too often, like Melissa, “slumping/in the third row,” we ask ourselves “why we have to/read this stupid stuff” (“The Mists of Poetry”).  In “Yucatan Dreams,” Kroeker tells us why: like the speaker in that poem with his charges (tourists? Students?), Kroeker makes us look down into “a well deep/and scummed, . . . /. . .into the face/of sacrifice and fear” and up “to the tops/of towers and temples, /. . . /. . . ./[at] limestone beauty/carved like lace/and pyramids that spoke/the language of the sun.” 

Most of us, unfortunately, are too much like Melissa or the Yucatan tourists: we “only dream/of air-conditioned rooms/and shorelines frond/by postcard palms.”  But sometimes, even the consolations of philosophy or of the life of the mind become only that, mere consolations, the intellectual equivalents of “icy drinks beside/the pool . . ./or discoing till dawn,” and we need something stronger.  Like the student in “Differential Equations” “whose father is dying,” for whom “differential calculus,” “Plank’s constant,” “the imagery/of mermaids,” and “a red wheel/barrow glazed with rain” become things which merely occupy her time, we need “a dark, archaic grammar,/formulas less rooted/to [our] reasoning age/ . . ./a drink rejuvenescent/and distinct—a draught/to do the work of God.”  We need “a draught” of Kroeker’s poetry.

For that poetry summons us to see the paradoxical duality both of life itself and Kroeker’s own vision of it.  That is, not only is Kroeker aware of both the “scummed” well and the limestone “carved like lace” but sometimes he sees only one side at a time and declines the validity of the other.  Thus, in two poems on facing pages, “Out of Season” and “Docent at Descanso Gardens,” the speaker takes opposing sides in two conflicts about essential approaches to life.  In “Out of Season,” the “I” “plant[s]” . . ./bulbs in a dry season/and dream[s] of spring” and is “warmed/by the flames/of small hopes,” while “you” wears a “chilly grin,” “anticipates the fall,” and walks “bundled/with sweaters/and coats.”  But in “Docent at Discanso Gardens,” the “I” “divines/the canker . . ./. . . /takes in rot,/beholds the blight/on his bright paradise,” while the “he” “see[s] . . . /. . ./the speckled dove,” “hear[s] . . . the rise/and fall of a high perched/robin’s call,” and “sense[s] with springtime skin/a balm of sun or shadow’s kiss.”

Ultimately, however, Kroeker’s vision focuses on the hard won and sometimes bitter hope that may come through the horror, on the possibility of the “something wondrous” that may come if only one is willing to “embrace/the ancient rankness,/ . . .[to] contend/with losses, both/of history and the heart” (“Yucatan Dreams”).  And while one may say that the “comfort always at hand” which Kroeker says in “Resurrections” may seem a bit soft and easy, the startling and sometimes terrifying springs which come are, nevertheless, springs in spite of—perhaps because of—the very unexpectedness of terror or their coming.  Thus, in “Quartzsite Easter,” a drive through “mile/after lifeless mile, [through] an arid/landscape mirroring my own” ends with a spreading burst of the varied colors of desert flowers, and “I/am reminded how life comes/mostly by surprise, and even/a desert place can be reborn.”  But this still-lyrical metaphor for rebirth of the speaker’s own “mile/after endless mile/[of] arid landscape” is paralleled by the terrible and terrifying spring which comes to Babi Yar: “the ease of a blind/earth giving back the dead/in trees and grass,/ . . . a spring/belching up its green/even at Babi Yar.”

Ultimately, too, Kroeker’s poetry serves a purpose beyond the imaging of his duality, beyond the leading of the reader through the paths of poetry and life, beyond the summoning forth of springs both lyrical and awful.  Ultimately, Kroeker’s poetry summons the reader to a willingness to “contend with rising sap,/with blood and pulse/heart and spleen” (as he put it in the title poem of his first collection, Vernal Calibrations), to “contend/with losses, both/of history and the heart.”

Only through such contending can human beings give voice to life so that it will be able to “sing/its brash and/perilous overture/against the night” (“Against the Night”).  Kroeker’s poetry of contending is one of those voices which help us to remain aware of “still the longing” within us even—especially—when we are caught again in “[t]he dream again,” [t]he nightmare again,” of “A Darkness Defined.”

                                                                                                Sidney Krome,
                                                                   Author of The Nancy Tapes and Odysseus to Athena,
                                                                   Professor Emeritus of English at Coppin St. Univ.

 

The Monika Poems

 

 

 
Details:
Paperback: 40 pages
The Marchland Press (Germany)
Language: English
Special Edition  

 

 

 
Author’s Note: Most of these poems were composed after Monika’s death in July of 2005, with a very few begun during the latter stages of her illness.  Some are directly about her and our relationship, while in others the connections may be harder to see, but each and every poem was triggered or inspired in some way by my memories, thoughts or experience of her.  She was and always will be my greatest fan, and more importantly, my own personal Muse.

Critical comments

In the fall of 1962, I met my new college roommate, G. W. Kroeker, who was to become a life-long friend. All on our small campus were a bit in awe. He was a superb physical specimen and athlete, recently discharged from the 101^st Airborne, with maturity and experience that set him apart from the rest of us. As we attended our classes together and discussed all manner of things after hours, we soon recognized his intellectual talents were just as formidable.  And while most of us searched for some sort of interest to guide us, Gary had a single-minded passion for writing. He has never wavered or wanted to do anything else for as long as I have known him.

His devotion to his work came early in life, but his deepest love did not come until later. In the summer of 1998, just by chance, the way a chance meeting can change lives, he met Monika Hasse on a train in the German countryside. They soon fell in love, married and spent five of their happiest years together before her untimely death in 2005.

Since the loss of Monika, Kroeker has returned to poetry, and we are the richer for it. In The Monika Poems we read some of his finest work. They are not only a tribute to her, but without relying on sentimentality, they speak of life, love and loss as personal yet universal human experiences with a voice that is piercingly straightforward and clear. Not only has Kroeker brought his considerable intellect and skilled craft to these poems, he has left his heart here and we are moved and deeply touched. 

                                                                                                            Morgan Higgins,
                                                                                                            Burbank, CA

In these poems we share not only grief, but memories, not merely sadness, but gratitude for a way of living.  Kroeker has managed to transform personal loss into verse informed continually by a living presence.

                                                                                                            Richard Martin,
                                                                                                            former professor of American literature,
                                                                                                            University of Aachen, Germany

This little volume is one of the most moving, unsentimental and well crafted collections of poems about grief, loss and love that I have ever read. 
                                                                                                           
                                                                                                             C.W., USA