*Starred Review* Barker, one of the most compelling and musical formal poets in England, here joins the religious verse tradition of Blake and Hopkins, producing an active, almost athletic devotional poetry of mystery more than mysticism. The publisher points out that Barker touches on Islam, Judaism, and farther-Eastern religions, but this is forthrightly Christian stuff, though as far from modern evangelical "inspirational" writing as are Eliot and Auden. Indeed, the big title poem, each of whose six parts consists of 10 "sonnets," the lines of which resemble the couplets of Hebrew psalmody, is so impacted with quotation and allusion that Barker appends, a la The Waste Land, an extensive "exegesis" of his sources. Barker translates "Damnatio Memoriae" as "Erased from Memory," and in the poem he aims to erase the erasure by cynicism, corruption, political violence, dissipation--the list could be indefinitely extended--of the capacity to recognize virtue and pursue it to God. It is gorgeous but not easy reading, like Hopkins. The many shorter pieces that precede it include poems of home, family, companionship, sex, and marriage; a kaleidoscopic series on virgins and the Virgin; personal occasional poems; and reports of conversion, devotion, and celebration of the divine, immanent and present in the working world--many of these are Blakean, as songlike and simple in diction as they are complex in implication. Ray Olson
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Review
Sebastian Barker is a considerable figure; vital, prolific, dynamic, and full of fireworks.'Derek Stanford, Acumen'[Barker is] clearly one of the few poets to be committed to hard and serious thinking about the roots of our imagination and spiritual life.' Kathleen Raine'[He] takes us deep into both a real and an allegorical landscape, clearly signposted for those who might otherwise lose their way.' Jane Holland, Blade
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