|
Winner of the 2001 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry
"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 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
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."
Rick Barot was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. His first book, The Darker Fall, was the winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry and was published by Sarabande Books in 2002. His poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including The New England Review, The New Republic, Poetry, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. His work has also appeared in many anthologies, including The New Young American Poets, Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation, and Legitimate Dangers. In 2001 he received a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has taught at Stanford University, California College of the Arts, The George Washington University, and Lynchburg College. He lives in Tacoma, Washington, and teaches both in the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and at Pacific Lutheran University.
|
