The Spirit Level [Paperback]

David Barber (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Winner of the Terrence Des Pres Prize for Poetry

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 81 pages
• Publisher: Triquarterly; 1 edition (October 25, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0810150247
• ISBN-13: 978-0810150249
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,983,148 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mannered but meaty, February 7, 2005

By 

Tuor (Ithaca, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Spirit Level (Paperback)

David Barber's first book is unusual for its time - he resists dipping into sloppy/fertile formal experimentation, pop culture razzmatazz, and otherworldly (read: inaccessible to terrestrials) lyricism, though he can't seem to get enough good ol' ekphrasis. In many poems he stands at a considerable intellectual distance from his subjects (refreshingly diverse, if not stunningly original: items from childhood, childhood scenes, Oriental art, early Americana, a Dürer illustration, flowers, harvesting, dead relationships), which, at worst, leaves the reader slogging through mouthfuls of abstraction ("Where brute facts are lacking, exactitude takes refuge / in preternatural convictions") or needlessly baroque wording ("I am persuaded that he saw in you / no rampant scourge or parasitic civic vice / but a surpassing glossary of carnal knowledge, / a testament to dispassionate enterprise, / case studies in the eternal push and shove / between vanity's dictates and priapic verities").

Fortunately, there is very little worst in this book. When he's on, Barber works his hypervocab like a well-tuned instrument: "Congeries of lumpish caps, clustered thrusts / of lucid delicacies conjugated out of rot"; "the weaving coast route out of the mission town / hewn from wind-drubbed cliffs by platoons of coolies"; "imperiously democratic, scrupulously discomposed, / it's worked clean through the bottom / of the watering can, throttled the shears / with cankers, caked the one good trowel." Not much in this book is conventionally portrayed, instead reglossed with the gaze of a passionate thinker until something internal gleams.

And this is more a thinker than a feeler writing. His "personal" poems are precious few and laden with the kind of intellection that turns them not into windows on his past emotional reality so much as telescopes, or microscopes. Barber's concern with precision is a cursed blessing; as I've tried to show above, when music drives the thought, it startles, but when thought drives the thought, it stumbles. Aside from "Zooms and Pans" and maybe "The Divided City" (both spilling over into clunky from sheer verbiage), these poems, including "First Light, False Dawn", "The Lather", "The Favor", and the superb "Nocturne" (one reason to buy the book) strike a better balance between words and spirit.

For a first book, this is strong. Barber has successfully courted Auden's Dame Philology and is well into wooing the Muse ("Memo On the Hereafter" and "Dawn of the Atom" brim with imagination - of a wistful and creepy kind, respectively). This book is not avant-garde, political, or a wormhole of ironies, but it will make you turn, with pleasure, to your dictionary. That is one kind of seduction I personally ask of poetry: to flesh out my language with the unexpected.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars From Incantation to Incandescence, February 10, 2005

By 

Ivy Kleinbart (Geneva, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Spirit Level (Paperback)

David Barber shows uncanny dexterity with language in this impressive first book which wholly embraces the spirit of its epigraphs, particularly Stevens's remark that "The imperfect is our paradise." Reversing this logic in his "Memo on the Hereafter," Barber writes, "If it's heaven/ I'm asked to aspire to and bear in mind,/ I want the place to make room for a little rust."

Often writing from the perspective--though not the voice--of a child, or from the perspective of an adult looking back on childhood, Barber succeeds in capturing the sense of a world newly experienced, one of magic, discovery, horror, and delight, where the underside of a bridge seems like an "imperial vault" and where "every full moon/ [seems] a scorching lump of coal above the freightyards/ and men and beasts alike dance for their lives." These childhood surprises are interwoven with formative moments in American history, such as a ride on the early railway, the arrival of the south's first mail-order brides, and a 1953 nuclear test over St. George, UT.

If memory is the spirit level that Barber uses to revisit and re-measure the contours of the past, what saves these poems from nostalgia is an attention to the many fissures and aporias that haunt memory. Rather than gloss over these moments, Barber seizes them as opportunities to re-imagine the truth. After all, "What is memory," he asks, "But what the body agrees to abide by?"

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent poet, January 25, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: The Spirit Level (Paperback)

These complex, arresting poems get better on each read-through. David Barber is a master of the English language, and writes on a myriad of subjects, from love, to art, to televised sports. A great first book.