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 self-it 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 Miró, 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."

Read

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Reading Plato

I think about the mornings it saved me
to look at the hearts penknifed on the windows
of the bus, or at the initials scratched

into the plastic partition, in front of which
a cabbie went on about bread his father
would make, so hard you broke teeth on it,

or told one more story about the plumbing
in New Delhi buildings, villages to each floor,
his whole childhood in a building, nothing to

love but how much now he missed it, even
the noises and stinks he missed, the avenue
suddenly clear in front of us, the sky ahead

opaquely clean as a bottle's bottom, each heart
and name a kind of ditty of hopefulness
because there was one you or another I was

leaving or going to, so many stalls of flowers
and fruit going past, figures earnest with
destination, even the city itself a heart,

so that when sidewalks quaked from trains
underneath, it seemed something to love,
like a harbor boat's call at dawn or the face

reflected on a coffee machine's chrome side,
the pencil's curled shavings a litter
of questions on the floor, the floor's square

of afternoon light another page I couldn't know
myself by, as now, when Socrates describes
the lover's wings spreading through the soul

like flames on a horizon, it isn't so much light
I think about, but the back's skin cracking
to let each wing's nub break through,

the surprise of the first pain and the eventual
lightening, the blood on the feathers drying
as you begin to sense the use for them.

Blurbs

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Winner of the 2001 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry selected by Stanley Plumly

"This is a book of lyric wonders: wit that turns dark, darkness that blazes up again in music and story. These are poems of eros and elegy. But they also have a rare, unswerving quality of dailiness. The cockroach and the jasmine and the heartbroken speaker all coexist in this world, made vivid in these poems by the exuberance and skill of a wonderful new poetic voice."

—Eavan Boland

"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

"Though The Darker Fall opens with a poem entitled 'Reading Plato,' both the poem and the book are finally an argument against that philosopher of the eternal forms. This poet chooses the actual every time, and finds the numinousthere. A section of one poem is called 'Inventory,' and that could beapplied to the book as a whole: Barot is a poet in love with the multipleand 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

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