My first in-person reading since Petition came out in 2020 finally happened mid-August at the Grolier Poetry Bookshop. The tiny space has survived in its Harvard Square location since 1927, selling “mostly poetry––minimum of prose,” and I was excited to read with two poets whose work I’ve admired for years. I’d read with Steven many times, but this was my first occasion to hear Jenny since her new book, The Sliding Boat Our Bodies Made, was published this year by The Word Works.
Barber’s poems are gems of nuance. “Slipping–is Crashe’s law–” Dickinson wrote, and Barber is exquisitely attuned to the slip. In “The Rules Today,” “No trees. Nothing about death,” slides into “Or something about trees.” Her identification guide becoming less and less useful, she loses her way, finally familiar “only with the veins/…in a witch hazel leaf.” Barber captures the nature of loss as her power and comprehension diminish bit by bit, etched in the contrast between an entire genus and a single leaf.
There’s not a millimeter of fat in a Jennifer Barber poem. “The lamp in the borrowed room” displays “milky blossoms//down the front in a single spray/…//each flower made of three/round petals, three arching stamens.” The speaker’s examining a commonplace object in detail––haven’t we all done that when left alone in a strange place? She notices precision in the “stamens” and less of it in “plump white dots meant to be buds.” But what’s drawn the speaker to the lamp, the reader learns, is its illumination of an “open newspaper.” The tension in those first lines deepens; not only is the speaker in a room not her own, but she’s just read that the “Syrian cease-fire failed again.//The Red Cross buses came too late.” The dispassionate examination of an object becomes, in retrospect, her reaction to a horror.
Barber ends the poem by widening her focus: “A floorboard creaks/when I walk from the bed/to the fraying armchair and back.” We locate the setting a little more firmly: a bit shabby, and, like a hotel room, one where bed and armchair share space. But we also understand action: the speaker paces after reading the article, privy to both estrangement and privilege; though the speaker’s “borrowed” location is safe, she knows there are “many hells outside this room.”
“These Mornings,” takes another approach to transformation. “I light a candle at daybreak,” the poem begins; a litany of repeated actions follow: “I sleep. I wake. Another indigo/ fills the window of my room.” Winter is here: “By now the trees have shed their leaves./ I light the grapefruit-scented candle/ with three wicks; I fall in love with it/ and scissors and pens and paperclips.” Work, for the night is coming, Barber suggests: “I strip to a shadow of myself.” Joy jostles with diminishment; of this complexity Barber writes, “What I feel I feel for all of us–/the highway driver, the insomniac,/my friend waiting to hear what the doctor found.” The poem ends with the snap of a lid on a perfectly made box–one you didn’t realize had a lid.
The blurbs for The Sliding Boat Our Bodies Made praise the poet’s compassion, watchfulness, her embrace of perplexity alongside visions of wholeness, and her meticulous craft. She’s alert to history and how it shapes us, or fails to. But Barber’s eroticism can’t be ignored; “Frequency and Pitch” begins with the love song of a species of bird whose sonorous feathers inhibit flight, then shifts to the tale of Inanna enjoying her consort: “the shepherd Dumuzi/ filled my lap with cream and milk.” The oak at her bedroom window “shakes its leaves/a few at a time, then all at once” in its own version of release, as art and nature tip the poet into recalling “the sliding boat our bodies made.” Pitch-perfect and subtle, Jennifer Barber’s new collection invents a sequence of pleasures not to be missed.