The Book of Kells (Poiema Poetry)

Barbara Crookers eighth book of poetry The Book of Kells focuses on the illuminated medieval manuscript with a series of meditations on its various aspects from the ink and pigments used by the scribes and illustrators to the various plants animals and figures depicted on its pages including the punctuation and use of decoration in the capital letters. It also contains poems on the flora and fauna of Ireland (swans hares magpies fuchsia gorse crocosmia etc.) that Crooker encountered during writing residencies at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in County Monaghan. The third thread in this volume is a series of glosas a fifteenth-century Spanish form that incorporates a quatrain from other poems; here Irish writers (Yeats Heaney ODriscoll) provide the embedded lines. In her work Crooker considers the struggle to pin lines to the page to tie experience to the written word to wrestle between faith and doubt to accept the aging body as it tries to be fully alive in the world. Crooker contrasts the age of faith when the Book of Kells was created to our modern age of doubt and uses as her foundation the old stones of Irish myth and lore from pre-Christian times. She juxtaposes a time when the written word was laborious and sacred against our electronic world where communication by pixel is easy and brief. Above all she captures the awe that the word inspired in preliterate times: The world was the Book of God. The alphabet shimmered and buzzed with beauty.