Geographic Range
The Singers I Prefer by Christian Barter. CavanKerry Press, 2005. 87 pp. $14. Reviewed by Seth Michelson.
Remarkably subtle and distinctive for a first book of poems, Christian
Barter's The Singers I Prefer explores the diversity of voices
comprising the world. Poem by poem, he individuates a variety of animate
and inanimate subjects, including musical instruments, suicidal writers,
German weapons from World War I, insects, Greek heroes, and himself in
the first, second, and third person. Not content only to enact these
voices, Barter interrogates their necessity, asking "Do we need all
these voices?" His answers are as expressive of a unitary metaphysics as
they are rich in imagination and emotional nuance:
...I have noticed
that many voices heard together
become a single voice, and that even
silence, after a while, will begin
to squeak in its chair, to cough.
A tribute to Barter's skill and vision, the book's
distinct voices ultimately resound as one, and that coherence is largely
achieved through Barter's use of unhurried syntax and vernacular language.
That combination imbues each voice with a tough, resilient consistency, and
it also permits the occasional flash of Barter's good sense of humor. Take
for instance the following lines about his former belief in marijuana's
potential to save the world:
Not this
world, necessarily, but
the real one underneath it all
on which our lives float -
this is getting deep -
like driftwood or something. Well,
not that it needs saving, the
real world underneath it all, just
finding again and again and again.
Although rarely that jokey, the book's poems are
consistently that immediate and deliberate. They affect the reader's mind
the way the year's first snow affects Barter's native Maine: The November
day is clear and sunny when a cloudbank drifts subtly in, and suddenly
snowflakes are falling, changing the landscape for months to come.
Most often Barter's new landscapes strand the reader
between "some almost crippling pain" and "all the sweetness," as in the
book's title poem. And like those singers, Barter
repeatedly aspires to confront life's long suffering with music's
restorative beauty. This is as striking in the self-exploratory poems of the
book's first and third sections as it is in the second section's outward
investigations of historical moments, items, and figures. An example of the
former arises through the wispy couplets of the poem "Drawing," a gossamer
narrative on the fragility of memory and, consequently, of art:
...I remember now
the nights we sat all night at the window,
sending our smoke into the street and getting
back the sweet cool of August,
our words loaded with careless
importance, as though we thought
that even our smallest gestures
would last forever.
Perhaps one of the finest aspects of Barter's talent
lies in his control of lineation. Not only do his lines manipulate the
reader's breath to conduct each poem's music, but the lines also often
create synesthetic metaphors for the poem's content by arranging sounds and
rhythms. For instance consider the opening lines of the poem "George Dorr's
Abandoned Bicycle Path":
They say it may have been
- built
in 1906
- the world's first
trail for mountain biking, now all
the rage for the synthetic-garbed,
the nuclear-bright...
Here the poem is as syntactically bumpy and curvy as
the bicycle path of its title. Furthermore, the already heavily stressed
lines are enjambed with violence and velocity. This forces the reader to
breathe frequently and at odd, sudden junctions, much the way a cyclist
might huff and gasp while navigating Dorr's rugged trail. Similarly, the
lines, with their interposed clauses and hard punctuation, feel forcibly
hewn from the wilderness of the blank page, thereby paralleling Dorr's
creation of his path from the undifferentiated land.
Like lineation, time is also masterfully controlled
throughout the book. In his more chronologically modest poems like "Russian
Dead in No-Man's-Land, 1915," Barter delves into relatively finite,
contiguous moments, while in other poems he stretches and compacts time more
wildly. For example, in "The Lost World of the Aegean," Barter compresses
millennia into seconds and then dilates those seconds into infinity:
...a painting displays two Minoan women
in finely wrought jewelry feeding a monkey
between the pillars of a stone bathhouse.
Nearing the end of another relationship,
I'm at the point where
I don't
want anything to die anymore -
the women, the monkey, the civilization,
even the creator of the Marlboro Man ...
This crafty juxtaposition of the historical with the
personal suffuses the speaker's private despair with the heft and breadth of
an entire era, thereby exacerbating his anguish by protracting it beyond its
rational, self-contained space. And if that enlargement of the personal were
not consuming and relentless enough, the subsequent catalogue then wallops
the reader with four sharp blows of metonymic sadness, ensuring a type of
debasement and disorientation of the reader. Such deep anguish in a young
poet's work can become reiterative, dull, and solipsistic, but Barter avoids
such failings by moving constantly. He moves with great geographic range,
roving from Maine to Cambria to Vietnam to Brest-Litovsk and elsewhere, and
he moves equally nimbly across intellectual space, engaging the metaphysics
of Homer, Yeats, Dickinson, Hemmingway, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Nietzsche,
Beethoven, Bach, and many others.
But Barter's finest, fiercest movement derives from his
use of disjunction, which fuels one of the book's most memorable poems,
"Something Else." Closing the collection, the poem intertwines three
distinct narrative threads: the speaker's four-day fever when "the world / took on a kind of flickering darkness," the speaker's friend stumbling
through "a sadness for her little sister, killed / in a wreck," and a member
of the speaker's card game who "dreams / of a dead friend all the time." The
integration of those threads yields a plangently irresolvable climax, which
by itself is well worth the purchase price of this auspicious debut book,
let alone its forty-five other evocative poems.