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REVIEW of The Conversation By Kirsten Rian, The Oregonian, April 16, 2015 In 1990, the Voyager I space probe took a photograph of Earth from 6 billion kilometers. At that distance, our planet appeared as a speck, a tiny 'pale blue dot' as the image became known. And on this tiny dust mote out in space, all the life and death and love and trying and imagining and making and smiles and dancing and tears and hopes of all six billion of its inhabitants happens. A photograph like this makes one feel big and small all at the same time. Brain surgery can have that affect, too. Portland poet Judith Barrington spent the turning over of 2013 into 2014 in the hospital with surgery and recovery from abrain bleed. A year later she's produced a dense and beautiful book of poems (her first new full-length book of poems in more than 10 years) entitled "The Conversation," published by Salmon Poetry, that looks back over her childhood, her family, her memories, her grief. "Consider again that dot," astronomer Carl Sagan wrote in 1994. "That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering.... "The "aggregate of our joy and suffering" is our life. And Barrington's poems explore her recent and ongoing medical crises alongside the expanse of her history with the kind of clarity only found through a lot of loss. "This is my world./I have to learn to love it." closes the first poem in the collection and this learning involves assessing and remembering. Memory is like water is like music, capable of enveloping and washing over. Barrington does not deflect this encompassment, but rather allows it to fill the empty spaces of forgetting, and spill into the conversation about what is thought to be known about legacy, about one's history. In the poem "The Conversation," Barrington writes, "... The end may be/the end, though some piece of me, not quite finished,/has kept the words that belong in that talk/stuffed inside my mouth which is firmly closed" -- it's not a reconciliation, clean and considered, that allows the conversation with one's past or with people long since gone to continue. It's recognizing the impermanent remains, though formless; the "mechanical gestures of living," as poet William Carlos Williams wrote in his seminal book "Paterson" live on as remnants of gestures; it's unfurling the revolution of living and dying across the landscape of hopes and dreams and disappointments and calling it our own. Barrington achieves this level of honesty with the untangling at times, and tying up at others, of her past and present by directly stating the events and how they happened, and her feelings and their resonance. This clarity is part craft, to be sure, Barrington has been steadily writing for over five decades. But this voicing is also reflective of the poet herself, who has chosen to not encumber the nuance of her internal and external observations with unnecessary metaphor or figurative language. Her diction articulates with ease and intones emotions as well as events. Her poems are thoughtfully constructed, with stanzas, couplets and line breaks ending before becoming dependent on a syntactical trick or a sudden turn of story. Her construction choices to relay content are also apparent in the book divisions – three sections, Part One: My World; Part Two: The Book of the Ocean; and Part Three: Long Love. Water figures prominently throughout the book, and as Barrington detailed in her memoir published in 2000, "Lifesaving," her parents drowned following a cruise ship fire in 1963. The first stanza of the poem "The Book of the Ocean" that opens part two melds the natural world with grief, the hypothetical with the concrete. "They've all written their books: the wind Beauty and song somehow survives, reaching for land while looking for water. “I've been too attached to my own memories." Barrington writes in "Those Three Lost Days," a poem in the third section describing the days she can't remember during the chaos of the discovery of the subdural hematoma and subsequent brain surgery to relieve the pressure of the blood building up at the hematoma. In some respects, this collection of poems is about remembering the memories that have attached themselves, so that they and what they represent may be re-remembered, in a slightly different, slightly less-edged context, backfilled with the wisdom of experience and age and simply living on. In the second to the last poem in the book "Not a Credo," Barrington notes, "The light, the incredible light of every day/is followed not by darkness/nor even silence,/but, low and behold, the greatest emptiness emptied. |