Les Fauves is, as the title suggests, a collection of ekphrastic poetry, meditations on paintings from the Fauve and Post-Impressionist movements.
But it also contains poetry's equivalent to Fauvism, poems that take a walk on the wild side.
There are language experiment poems, poems of word play, poems in form both usual (end rhymes, sonnets, ghazals) and unusual (abecedaries, traditional, embedded, and double helix), palindromes, anagrams, and word scrambles.
Crazy word salad poems.
Crooker's subjects range widely, from living and working in a small village in the South of France, love in a long-term relationship, food as more than sustenance, faith in a secular age, grammar and usage, the pains and pleasures of the aging body.
But always, what engages her most is what it means to be human on this fragile planet, at this time in our troubled history, still believing that Beauty will save the world.
(Fyodor Dostoevsky).
C&r Press Les fauves, paperback/barbara crooker
