Few and Far Between

Dick Barnes

Something about Barnes’s poems makes you read quickly, slowly, then quickly again. There is an energy to his writing, an ebb and flow that counts word for word and makes each poem a complete moment of place, time, and feeling. He takes our world and ourselves and tries to get at how we live, and sometimes don’t live. Robert Mezey said of Dick Barnes, “His heart is pure, he tells us in one poem, and it is—we trust his voice because the rhythm doesn’t falter, the words ring true, have the unmistakable sound of truth.”

A sample poem from the book

Alluvium: A Reply

Somewhere two rivers rush together at the foot of a scarp,

meander over a coastal plateau, then down a barranca

the rio caudal plunges into its deep estuary

and huge canyons under the sea. But here

on this nearly level delta wide as the eye can see

streams mingle and separate, some sweet, some brack

some sink under their own silt, are lost in the arrowweed

where a curve of current earlier carved the bank

some dwindle down sloughs under poplar or willow,

the heron's home, some into quicksand, and

nothing is turning out the way you thought it would be,

nothing.