by Mikal Wix
October 15, 2024
Moving the Bones by Rick Barot; Milkweed Editions; 88 pages; $16.00.
Rick Barot’s new book, Moving the Bones, his fifth book of poems, is out from Milkweed Editions. He has collected many accolades over the years, such as the Kathryn A. Morton Prize, Grub Street Book Prize, the PEN Open Book Award, and the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award, and he has been a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the LA Times Book Prize. It’s an impressive set of accomplishments. But the most remarkable aspects of Barot’s oeuvre are their honesty and immediacy. This is not simply a result of his linguistic muscularity or elegant sensibility, but pulses from the meditative gravity that simultaneously pushes the language toward intimacy while pulling the reader back from the intensity of a definitive emotional precipice.
Barot’s work over a span of decades has explored and excavated this sincerity of expression by using a methodology best captured by the great essayist, Cleanth Brooks, who wrote, “The poet can legitimately step out into the universal only by first going through the narrow door of the particular.” But Barot’s candid poems from Moving the Bones create an intangible space where words can exalt feelings of longing or loss without losing their power to stabilize us in the understatement of rational, epiphanic thought. From his poem, “The Lovers”, the speaker in this poem admits, “I have been them, and whatever comes after, / and it has taken all my heart to contain both”, describing a position in the middle of a life and how it affords all the perspicacity of wisdom, from its self-awareness to its sorrow.
Barot uses this ability to look back and ahead, a domain populated by being middle-aged and shared by those who have suffered loss, to great effect in these new poems. Even the title, Moving the Bones, reflects a motion that digs beneath the surface: a place where memory and foresight comingle like the sides of a gravestone — the face of names and dates and the murky reverse of the pain behind it.
Throughout the book, the specter of the pandemic holds sway. At the center of the book is a group of 30 prose poems all beginning with the phrase, “During the pandemic,” which lays bare the unique circumstances of our enforced familiarity with ourselves, through loneliness, ruminations, fear, boredom, and rage. In the sixth poem in this series, the idea of an interval is probed, “During the pandemic, I knew we were in a period of interval….” And here we witness the reach of the poet’s grasp, when in the length of a sentence or two, the gulf of the plague of the virus is summed by a reference to the Irish playwright, Samuel Beckett’s, seminal play, Waiting for Godot, specifically Lucky’s speech in the middle of the play. The comparison is so direct and all encapsulating in its particularity that the poem seems to be the very picture of indirection: the irony unearthed in metaphoric fashion to reveal how the irrelevant can be a balancing act to mirror the pressures of context, how Lucky’s opening line, “Given the existence” reflects Barot’s opening line “During the pandemic”.
The core of prose poems in Barot’s book could represent one month of observations if they were written one per day during the pandemic. Or they could be a way to peer under the veneer to make a start at absorbing the moments we endured. There is a need to understand our pandemic experiences, to frame them in the particularities, to step back and estimate their influence and measure the force of the punches landed and thrown. Barot bravely steps into this vivid and excoriating mirror: “like newspapers writing the obituaries of the famous ahead of their actual deaths.” Is it cynical or sentimental, our need to see romance in the ironic? Yet, within the context of the book itself, they serve as an anchor buoy, bobbing on the surface to let all who care to look, the location of the backbone or pillar, or as the 10th poem offers, “What truth an inadvertence could betray.” Across these poems, the pandemic is compared to excess, severity, malignity, separation, abstraction, and especially memory. But it’s not the similarities that confide secrets to us; it’s the fidelity to the situation or moment that grants the reader the absence of doubt, a gift from the poet to make our belief unquestionable.
Each poem in this collection carries us beyond abstraction, returning us to the concrete, but with further insights into the themes of memory, identity, solitude, and love. The honesty of Moving the Bones flares across the poems like an opening night at the theatre, one in which the word “uncertainty” is underscored and in lights, as if to show that this is a poetics of anxiety, but a tremor that interrogates itself to find that the space between us is full of story, loss, and rebirth. The speaker in the opening poem, “Pleasure,” states, “You are told to believe in one paradise / and then there is the paradise you come to know.” And this is how the book begins — with a pragmatic nod to the vulnerability of faith. And then, from the final poem, “The Field,” the speaker asks, “Or am I only who I am now, astounded at the transport of the body / from one end of time to another.” It seems to this reader that these two quotes are answered by each other, that belief and time are simply the fires in which we burn, the bones in which we move.
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Honesty As Poetic Grammar in Rick Barot’s Moving the Bones
POETRY REVIEW
Image by Norbert Kundrak from Pexels
Mikal Wix lives in the American South, which seeds insight into many outlooks, including revenant visions from the closet. Their work can be found or is forthcoming in Corvus Review, Olit, Berkeley Poetry Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Roi Fainéant Press, decomp journal, and elsewhere, and works as a science editor by day.
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