Howard Barker’s Poetic Seduction

13Aug08

I just bought and finished Howard Barker’s brief collection of poems titled “The Breath of the Crowd,” and I am utterly enrapt. Austere poetry such as Barker’s truly displays genius at its most fine-tuned; finesse and an impressive command of the english language emerge when one is succinct, as he is and as most (if not all) successful poetry is. He’s wondrously adept at capturing the beauteous deformities humanity is blessed with in the scale of a single page.

I recommend this work to anyone who feels mundane occurrences are achingly sublime. But don’t take my word for it, here’s a sample:

Prologue

They’d bolt the past into a drawing room / If they could

Smother the yelps of a triumphant reason / In the hems of dresses

And the clots of inspiration mop up / In the flannel of an actor’s shirt

So it behoves us

At moments of false celebration / At moments of imminent colonialism / And selective memory

To reach through

The cities of print / The forests of film / The drowning sheets of bands

Bursting the teeth of the star / Breaking the grin of the celebrity

And bawling over the applause / Which draws the pebbles down the beach / And draws them up again

Describe

Our strata of pains on pains

Our silt of panics

Obscure crucifixions and unpublished griefs

Europe’s deeps

If that doesn’t quite tickle your fancy, perhaps my favorite passage of the poetic ensemble will, one which conjures the same intellectual aura the final scenes in Kafka’s The Trial–the second to last chapter titled In the Cathedral in which the omniscient narrator wonders if K., the ambiguously persecuted lead character, could “represent the congregation all by himself?” At any rate, in the first full fledged poem of the collection humbly titled 1, Barker writes: 

The man without religion / Haunts the empty church

Dragging his fingers over the bench / And counting his heel on the tiles

He is imagining a state of being alone

What do you think silence is / Only the absence of sound?

Poetry can often times be a fussy mistress to both poet and reader alike, and as such a tempestuous bedfellow it attracts specific people for specific reasons, I suppose–reasons that undulate with circumstance and age. Which is to say that my recommendations are fruitless in many respects–fodder for the wind–because I just can’t circumvent fickle nature of attraction, but I’ve personally resigned myself to this poet’s embrace and I hope you find yourself warmed by his rhythmic verbiage as well.

And did I mention the book was only $4.00, purchased unused at City Lights Books?

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Tags: books, City Lights Bookstore, Howard Barker, poetry