You Will Remember These Poems
by Jean L. Kreiling
The poetry of Barbara Lydecker Crane generates the happiest of paradoxes for the reader: her subtlety of thought impresses us just as we find ourselves chortling at her unpretentious wit. Or we marvel at an unusual image even as we instantly see her subject in exactly the same way. Or we’re struck by her exceptional cleverness while simultaneously we recognize our own quotidian thoughts (in especially eloquent guise). Or all of the above.
Crane excels at many varieties of verse, perhaps most notably ekphrastic poetry. Her collection You Will Remember Me (Word Galaxy Press, 2023) consists entirely of ekphrastic sonnets in the imagined voices of portrait painters, and she is currently at work on a manuscript inspired by landscape paintings. The majority of these ekphrastic poems are anything but light; many of them soberly address issues such as faith, jealousy, abuse, poverty, and the struggles of women. But in the teasing “The Empty Lap of Luxury” (from You Will Remember Me), the metaphorical “lap” of the title takes on increasingly literal and suggestive connotations. In this brief portrayal of wealth inequality in eighteenth-century England, Crane takes the voice of a painter who wanted the wife in his portrait to hold a “fresh-killed pheasant,” in silent mockery of her hunter husband. Crane’s word choices are winkingly deliberate—“fertile,” “dressing-down,” “limp”—leading inevitably (spoiler alert) to the final line’s “lifeless cock.” In a paradox typical of her work, this poem reflects careful consideration of the socio-economic positions of an artist and his subject, but the lesson takes the form of an earthy joke.
Crane also writes substantial narrative poems; “Intrigue at the Abbey,” from her most recent book (Art & Soul, Kelsay Books, 2025), offers mystery, romance, and a lesson in medieval manuscript preparation, all in a cycle of seven sonnets. Also incorporating relevant historical facts, the much lighter “The Ballad of Emily D.” (Zero Gravitas, White Violet Press, 2012) exploits Emily Dickinson’s suspected romance with Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Judge Otis Lord, along with an extended pun based on the judge’s last name, to weave a partly tragic but mostly comic tale. It parodies Dickinson’s style and also nods to some individual poems:
Because I could not go to Him—
He must have sent for Me—
. . .
Gin and Gale—Horse and Hail—
Not a Town in Sight—
Torrid Thoughts—frigid Limbs,
A wild, riled Night—
In this same poem, Crane employs surprising, yet fitting, word choices. When, at one point, Emily senses being watched and censured by those in the homes she rides past, she reports, “I saw that every Amherst house / Was fixing Panes on me—” and the reader immediately appreciates the image of window panes as large, judgmental eyes. Later, when “Sleet berated Skin,” the reader is struck by the unusual formulation, but also by its aptness. (It should be noted here that Crane delights in parodies; her models also include Shakespeare and William Carlos Williams.)
Crane’s cleverness with language extends to word play of all kinds. In her collection BackWords Logic (Local Gems Press, 2017), each poem features a pair of words, one of which reverses the spelling of the other. In “Joe to Go,” reprinted in this issue of Light, a mere four lines make clear the relationship between the paired words while explicating a widely shared attitude toward coffee. Although the poem’s protagonist customarily “faced” her morning with coffee, she found that “decaf” (the “back-word”) did not make her feel quite as “fresh-perked.”
In another poem from You Will Remember Me, verbal fun begins with the title: “Miss Moore No More.” This poem in fact tells a poignant tale of marriage and family, but ends with a slightly heartbreaking pun: “In time she let me lie in bed with her— / we’d spoon. I did my darnedest not to stir.” Similarly, in a series of short poems portraying imaginary birds (see “The Robertolink” in this issue), Crane often exploits words with multiple meanings to conjure the lives of our feathered friends. “The Blue-State Heron” (published in The New Verse News in August 2024) reminds us that the color of the heron has political implications, as does wind direction:
Flapping hard all day and night,
these herons grapple with their plight:
a right-wing gale distorts their flight.
Like many poets of light verse, Crane taps the catchy qualities of rhyme and meter to make her amusing arguments—but her work is especially notable for its wide variety of rhyming and metrical forms. She produces not only large numbers of sonnets, but also rhyming tercets (see the immediately preceding example), several varieties of quatrains, couplets in tetrameter, terza rima, and many ghazals. The devilishly difficult ghazal, of course, requires not only the frequent repetition of a single rhyme (and in fact, a single word), but also an effort to avoid the tiresome tone those repetitions might create. A ghazal titled “The Real Thing” (from Art and Soul) is less “light” in the humorous sense than in the sense of a bright outlook, as it tells the story of a long romance. The speaker first sees her lanky, loping beloved as “the cartwheel of you,” and falls for “the appeal of you,” relishing “the humming feel of you.” By the final couplet, the speaker’s white-haired partner still inspires “zeal for you.”
As a former graphic designer and quilt artist, Crane brings to her poems not just a facility for creating compelling images, but also the more literally visual inventiveness of her many carmina figurata (shape poems). “Roger R.’s Undercover Report” (from Zero Gravitas), the tale of a python who swallows a blanket (based on a BBC news report), appears in a long, serpentine shape consisting mostly of very short lines, with a series of longer lines forming a bulge in the middle corresponding to the python’s meal. (This poem also exemplifies Crane’s flair for tiny but effective bits of wit: it’s narrated by the snake’s intended meal, a rabbit, who strokes his own “furry foot” for luck.) And in the punnily, funnily titled “Death by a Nose,” reprinted in this issue of Light, seventeen lines in the shape of a nose reflect a cold-sufferer’s pessimistic obsession with that organ.
In an oeuvre that considers art, travel, family, history, and the joys and challenges of being human, the poetry of Barbara Lydecker Crane represents a wide-ranging intellectual curiosity contained within admirably well-crafted verbal contours. Her appearance as featured poet in this issue of Light, celebrating her brilliantly lighter side, is sure to enchant both her long-time fans and those who will learn here of a talented poet who abundantly rewards a reader’s attention. To paraphrase one of her book titles, you will remember this poet’s work.