3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of the best books I've read in years...., July 8, 2007
This review is from: Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced (Paperback)
I rarely review books on Amazon or take part in discussion threads some reviews tend to generate, but I wanted very much to say a few encouraging words regarding Catherine Barnett's book that might help get it into more and more people's hands. I have no intention of writing anything resembling an undergraduate English paper here because I believe it is one of the best and most powerful 5 books of poetry published in the last 5 years -- and it might be my favorite; I don't know. When you enjoy a book so much you have the opportunity to showcase it semi-professionally in a forum like this or simply convey your excitement and encouragement about it to others. I prefer the latter. First, to know and momentarily consider that this is Barnett's first book, I can only compare its achievement, its strength, success and ambition, to Spencer Reece's first book, "The Clerk's Tale" (Mariner: 2004). I cannot compare their content, but I can say that "Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced" and "The Clerk's Tale" are the two most powerful and strikingly original first books I have read in the last 5 years. Reece's book -- a finalist for The Poet's Prize -- won the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference Bakeless Prize; Barnett at least won the Whiting Award -- one of the highest praises a first book can receive. I wish both writers continued success as they begin their publishing careers.
Barnett's is a book that is, put simply, not just for lovers of fresh contemporary poetry, but also those individuals for whom poetry speaks to or consoles on basic human levels so many poets strive to reach. In this case, Catherine Barnett's first book of poems, grief, loss, tragedy -- utter devastation -- are the emotions at risk. And are they ever at risk. The poems are sharpened by not by psychology, which typically inspires the epiphany, but this is not a book where epiphanies are required or even encouraged. Rather, an almost dry, Aristotelian logic, and the un-falsified irony that and divides and shapes and divides and shapes our perceptions of reality prevails, urging the poems into their form. There is no 'pathetic fallacy' to be found here, only the irony that gives life its double meaning, rigidity and edge. Like Mark Doty -- who wrote in the preface to his memoir "Heaven's Coast" -- that he began writing it amidst a current of grief....the same can be said for this book. The brief autobiography behind "Into Perfect Spheres..." involves the death of her two young nieces who die in a plane crash just after the plane takes off from New York heading west for Seattle. On the beach, days after the crash, the narrator and her sister wait for luggage to come in with the tide, but as the locals know and say, nothing usually comes in.
Barnett never once subjects her poems to psychoanalysis because, frankly, the surface of the incident speaks for itself, which is not to say she writes "simply the facts". By controlling image, sound, the line, and again, that awful irony that can divide, shape and render our perceptions of how we've come to understand the world as it real to us -- when, in other words, one's soul is lost in the wake of such tragic loss -- these poems automatically speak to anyone who has experienced grief, whether it be the death of loved one or a profound and ghastly death like that of a plane crash. Her treatment of grief and loss is much less flamboyant than, again, Mark Doty's in "My Alexandria" and "Atlantis" -- both extremely powerful books, but Barnett does not invoke or rely on metaphor nearly as often as Doty does; her straightforward, matter-of-fact manner is almost reminiscent of certain Cavafy poems -- another poet who was well acquainted with grief and loss but could manage without metaphor or the sentimentality that makes, at least for me, the poems in the Doty books mentioned, worth reading.
The poems -- which move chronologically, beginning with the plane crash and ending the following year -- are thin, typically a page or two long with a few exceptions, but full of enough pressure you cannot deny their tension. This is why I say not only will serious poetry readers and poets alike admire this collection, but also the occasional reader of poetry. Latching onto the poet's knack for logic and restraint, an opportunity for dialogue opens up, allowing the reader to communicate with the words on the page -- pages to return and return to, much like the narrator and her sister returning to the beach where they wait for what remains from the crash to wash ashore in the tide where nothing is ever entirely understood. Meanwhile, watching her sister cope with the loss of her two children, poems appear throughout the book, each carefully placed, which show her own young son playing, oblivious to the suffering that has permeated their family for a year, and beginning to grow up.
This is not an easy book to read. Richard Foerster, Henri Cole, Mark Doty, Frank Bidart, and the brilliant Jane Kenyon are a few other poets just off the top of my head who have written several books to date or during their lifetime that pose enormous emotional difficulties in their work. Add Catherine Barnett to that list. These are the poems worth reading. And this year, too, you have Richard Foerster's new book "The Burning of Troy" (BOA: 2007), as well as Henri Cole's "Blackbird and Wolf" (FSG: 2007) -- two poets who master their sadness, loss and grief in ways that make you keenly aware of your physical self more than many poems, novels and anything on TV can. But when "Into Perfect Spheres..." came out, I was working at Alice James Books in Farmington, Maine, and witnessed the overwhelming success that immediately came upon the book's publication date -- a success I have seldom seen fall on small poetry presses. Furthermore, to the interest, perhaps, of future readers, I interviewed Catherine Barnett for the publisher's annual newsletter. In the newsletter, I remember asking her if she felt her young son, who appears throughout the book, was a symbol or not, or I asked if she felt her son had any symbolic representation whatsoever. Barnett insisted her son was in NO way a symbol, nor could she speak of him as such, that every time she wrote about him -- young, happy, oblivious to the suffering that had for the past year permeated their family, and beginning to grow up -- she felt she betrayed her sister.
Those are some of the most powerful words I have heard in response to a relatively simple question, and it is an answer that shows, again, just how painful this book is. But just because it is painful and despairing, though, should not scare anyone away from reading it. Anyone familiar with Elaine Scarry's "The Body in Pain" understands that pain unmakes and makes the world. "Into Perfect Spheres..." is about re-making a world with language, with poetry, allowing the soul to re-enter oneself again. It is an extremely good book, mature, well-crafted, brilliant in so many places, and is never once pretentious or inaccessible. Once you figure out what the title means -- and you will early on in the book -- you will know that it will not be a book that ever finds its way to a used bookstore. Poetry is capable of doing so many things: it preserves, pushes, instructs, guides, informs, delights, it speaks to us, but more than so many books in print, this book will hold you as tightly as you will hold it. I've read it over five times and recently sent a copy to a friend so I do not have passages to quote from, or else I would. Google her name and find whatever poems are available online. There are some on the Alice James Books Web site as well. Find "Theology" if you can. Read this book. How could it ever end?
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