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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Was oblivion deserved?,
By
This review is from: Collected Poems (Paperback)
This was a poet praised by Yeats and Eliot as one of the greats of the 20th century. He was all but forgotten, except for his role in Elizabeth Smart's "By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept" but the recent Fraser biography ("Chameleon Poet"} has raised interest.Was he really all that good? Well the first problem is that he wrote a lot of bad poetry. He had his own ideas about poetic scansion, which may have been valid, but which often give the casual reader the impression that this is rhyming poetry that does not scan, producing a McGonagall effect. Atrocious puns often add to an aura of amateurism. Another defect is a strain of pretentiousness, often highlighted by howlers, malapropisms and inadvertent neologisms. We read of gladiola, "Hylas by a Babylonian spring," "divers descending into Tuscaroras," parthenogenical idols, cupidons, Obermann villages,and "dreams of Aphasia." "Arroya" is an example of the sort of thing we might pass over or blame on the proof-reader in prose, but which, especially when italicized, suggests a poet who is ignorant of Spanish but wants to use a foreign word for effect. Thus when we come to "quixotic quanta" and an alleged translation from Meleager we begin to suspect fake erudtion. A hint of adolescent locker-room boasting of amatory triumphs mars the love poetry. Professed penitence seems to mask a desire to show that he is a desirable fellow who has had sex with many women. He was often paired with Dylan Thomas, which may be unfair. They were contemporaries but Thomas made the good career move of dying young. They both had a way with adjectives, but whereas Barker piled on fancy long words like "multitudinous" Thomas used a subtle misplacement of common short words as in "not many then trod the rich and piling streets." They both wrote plays for radio around the same time. Barker's was about the spirits of Baudelaire and Gerald Manley Hospkins. Thomas's was about humble Welsh villagers. No need to ask which one survived. There are a few gems, like the one quoted by Thwaite in the TLS review of the Fraser biography, but you have have to search hard in these 800 pages to find them.
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