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Somerville Bagel Bard Alice Weiss reviews a new collection from poet Jennifer Barber:

Spare and lovely, the poems in Jennifer Barber’s Works on Paper resonate with answerings. Not just call and response or antiphon, although that is there too, her poems seek out the moment when, even though the call is inaudible, there is something. In Source, the opening poem, the leaves, hearing the rain before it sounds, lean “toward the place where the rain is about to begin … widening the surface of their urgency, their need/to register each shifting of air.” In Assembling a Psalm, phrases propose a psalm, without being one, and at the same time, being one: the sun, the cedars, grass like flesh, and where is she? She doesn’t know and not knowing still, and we find an answering:

Works on Paper
by Jennifer Barber
published by Word Works
Winner of the 2015 Tenth Gate Prize

there is always a turn

a way to open the lips

L.B. is a four part lyrical tracing through a father’s last months. At first the unstated questions are simply obvious, “A couple of weeks or months. . . /Sometimes we are wrong,” In October,  “A week ago outside/ was with him still.” but the divisions between question and answer disappear,

Today, in the window

in the trees,

soundless collisions

of light and dark

impossible to divide

and finally in Morphine, his last words, the process reverses: An answer, “I have to be there by noon.” and then the question.

Are these my eyes

under my hand.

The poet does not so much struggle with her grief as let it make images of itself. It doesn’t feel effortless so much as full of grace:

he was growing wings,

and would leave us when the wings grew in.

Antiphon in ordinary life is a metaphor for conversation. At one point in the collection she asks, “Is bereft some kind of command,” as if to force the language to have a conversation with itself. In Almanac, a graceful and gracious compression of one of Virgil’s Georgics, where beehives are ruled by a king, she wonders “Who first discovered/ it was a queen?” The conversation turns outward. “outside” so to speak is with her still and rich, with Tolstoy, Chekov, Goya. This last, a delicious poem about an etching of four bulls where I suspect her father peers out at us.

In Benign, after the death begins to recede, conversation with the world and other voices generates an answering response in her own world, the strange consolation of art. She reads The Death of Ivan Ilych, and of his last three days, but putting the book aside, hears that

The wind

roughs up the highest branches of the oak.

The ear opens like an eye

—Unable to fit in the sack

or work free of it, he howls and howls.

The other singular quality of an underlying call and response pulse is music.  Barber’s lines are like measures, often couplets, always short, but her language is flowing so the tension between the stops and the flows is like, well, I flounder for a metaphor of my own, but it’s simple. It’s like song.  These are the notes that struck my ear reading this time through.

The moon

naked as a slate

impossible to write on or ignore.

A gazelle is wearing

antelope pants.

By pear I mean pear,

not a riddled heart.

At least I think I do.

The flesh of it laid bare

One more thing. My favorite lines in the collection come from a poem called Near Eastern Creation Myths.

After the great battle

when the leader of the gods

split with his arrow

the Mother of All.

he stretched half of her out as heaven,

he fattened the rest of her as land.

— Alice Weiss