Synopses & Reviews
In his astonishingly assured debut volume, Rick Barot brings the reader the "news that stays news," as Pound wished it for poetry. But his is not the tired history of another isolate selfit is news of the world, transformed by individual presence. With an eye and ear so finely tuned we are reminded of Elizabeth Bishop, Barot's poems convince us that philosophy and landscape are inseparable from human vision. Painters like Miro, Bonnard, Rembrandt, and the ideas of Wittgenstein and others are caught in Barot's line of sight, but so are alleyway shards of glass. These poems are filled with the pleasures of vivid language, yes, but they are more than that. Rick Barot reminds us of the forgotten dimensions of meaning present in our modest, all-too-human gestures: "I remember my mother planting roses/ as one way the mundane gets brought into/ sacredness, though it was simply a thing she liked/ to do."
Review
"Though The Darker Fall opens with a poem entitled [Reading Plato,' the poem, and the book, is finally an argument against that philosopher of the eternal forms. This poet chooses the actual every time, and finds the numinous there. A section of one poem is called [Inventory,' and that could be applied to the book as a whole: Barot is a poet in love with the multiple and particular items of the phenomenal world. [The shuffle of images' is always with him. Initials scratched into a cab partition, a glove lying on the grass: in these poems [a precise light [is] found for each,' illuminating in every sense." Reginald Shepherd
Review
"Barot's first collection, The Darker Fall, is a brilliant example of language as means, as an art nearly flawless in its transformation of emotional and actual sources. . . . Barot's mature linguistic skills really come down to a metaphorical and musical intelligence that refuses to value one element over another, that will not let the language or the longing take over. Thus the ease, the warmth, the inclusiveness, the confidence of his writing, and thus the impression of wholeness of its purpose." From the Foreword by Stanley Plumly
Synopsis
Winner of the 2001 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry.
"Barot’s mature linguistic skills really come down to a metaphorical and musical intelligence that refuses to value one element over another, that will not let the language or the longing take over."—From the Foreword by Stanley Plumly
"This is a book of lyric wonders: wit that turns dark, darkness that blazes up again in music and story."—Eavan Boland Rick Barot is currently Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University. He was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. He attended Wesleyan University, the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, and Stanford, where he was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow in Poetry.
Synopsis
Advanced Reader Copies and participation in Book Sense Program; Newsletter and catalog feature mailed to entire Sarabande database; 2000 brochures and 1000 postcards mailed to MFA programs, bookstores, and libraries.
Synopsis
Winner of the 2001 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, selected by Stanley Plumly.
About the Author
Rick Barot is currently Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University. He was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. He attended Wesleyan University, the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, and Stanford, where he was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow in Poetry. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous publications, including The Yale Review, The Threepenny Review, New England Review, Grand Street, and Ploughshares. In 2001, he received a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.