Tina Barr

As I often do with poetry books, I opened Gathering Eye to a random page. The poem was Mahmoud Abd El Ghaffar’s. I was immediately taken by the rich, heavy atmosphere but made the unwise assumption that I would merely be lulled by rich imagery. It turns out this is one of the ‘kinder, gentler’ poems in the book, so I was in for a shock when I then turned dutifully to the beginning of the book and read Ministry. It’s strange—the poem is both explicit and mysterious. It makes no bones (excuse the very bad pun) about the subject matter and yet I felt like I had come upon a totally unexpected scene and it was taking me a while to fully realize what it was I was looking at. In fact, many the poems in this collection have this disorienting (or re-orienting) effect. It’s as if we walk into a very detailed room—maybe a crime scene or just the jumble of a hoarder’s house or a small museum—and it takes a few seconds for the eyes to adjust and then communicate to the brain what we’re looking at. I like this effect. The poem Ministry and others are not linear but more like detailed canvasses that have to be explored in several directions. And then one steps back to get the whole picture.

Many of the poems are quite rich and dark and so it took me a while to work through them all. You can’t eat more than one at a time. In Eel Boys, Bottom, Canary there is something strangely beautiful and horrific all at once and that is really how life, isn’t it?, if we weren’t always editing out what makes us uncomfortable. The persistence of living things (ourselves and other things), even when horribly botched or wounded, the relentlessness of the life force is what disturbs us.

However, this violence happens off stage or twice-told as in Ministry, Bottom, Purpose of Jewelry, Under Flame Trees, Audentes Futuna. These last three delivering the violence as a surprise punch at the end. We don’t see the killing and maiming. We are left with the curious and peaceful cadavers. This is interesting to me, why the violence—the violence visited on humans at least—is off-stage or pre-poem. Is this a deliberate choice the poet has made, knowing how vivid her poetry is, to spare us the scenes of struggle and death of people, since the sight of the dead and decaying bodies is shocking/affecting enough? Or is it simply the even-handedness of that ‘gathering eye’, that gives death the same stage time as life?

Some of the poems, The Gardens of Babylon, Blue Hyphens in the Marsh, and even Addiction seem more fable-like and even ‘light’ compared to the others, like some foods that taste sweeter after we’ve eaten something bitter.

Tina Barr keeps us hovering right on the borderline between a neutral, highly visual curiosity and the horror, grief, etc., that we attach to many of these scenes. The poet opens doors most of us want to keep shut. It occurs to me after reading the whole book that she could have shook up her reader a lot more if she wanted to but she has made some deliberate choice in how much she will unsettle the reader. I feel, without detecting exactly how, in a craft sense, that she has a strong and trustworthy hand, i.e., she is lowering us down just above the bubbling vat so we can see what’s in it but she doesn’t dump us in.

Tina Barr is to be thanked for combating visual prudery, for opening our eyes and then being there to help the reader keep her eyes open just enough to be rattled but stay safe.… (más)