Word like Fire: Selected Poems

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Overview
Editorial Reviews
Product Details
Meet the Author
Table of Contents

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Overview

Thank you, other twolegged bare featherless creature,
for sharing the jagged horizon of my life.
Thank you rainbow over the East Mojave low to the ground so early in the afternoon:
thank you for being here with us.
- from "Bagdad Chase Road in July"

A Word Like Fire, the first comprehensive selection of his poems, should confirm Dick Barnes's place as one of the most accomplished and likable American poets of the last fifty years. His great subject is the Mojave Desert, the vast basin of ranges and valleys east and north of Los Angeles, with its beautiful shrubs and flowers, magnificent trees, ephemeral grasses, high lakes, rivers and dry river beds, alfalfa farms, and isolated towns with names like Essex, Cadiz Summit, Elephant Butte, Running Springs, Helendale, and often canny and solitary men and women. Of this world, Dick Barnes gives an indelible portrait in poem after poem.

But Barnes is more than a regional poet. As Robert Mezey writes in his brilliant Foreword, "He has an engaging variety of subjects, and to almost all of them he gives faithful perception and love." He is a master of the elegy, and wrote love poems, satires, devotional poems, and, Mezey notes, "poems of wry social comment and occasionally anger." In works such as "A Visit to Lonesome John: Autumn Coming," "Few and Far Between," "Clearing the Way," "Example and Admonition," and "Trophy Hunt"—surely one of the masterpieces of American poetry—the reader encounters a keenly observant, knowledgeable, humane, and passionate poet.

Editorial Reviews

The New Yorker

There are no unnecessary words in these poems, and no unnecessary poems in this book. Barnes, who died in 2000, at the age of sixty-eight, seems to have written a poem only when he had something to say. The occasions are mostly personal and local, the personal being, often, skirmishes and truces in the war between men and women, and the local being the “other” Southern California—the mountains and the desert east of Los Angeles. This is where Barnes grew up, and where he spent his career, teaching at Pomona College. The poems are lightly spiced with mysticism, though mysticism in the way of the Beats—an honest man’s recognition that the world is a little weird. What makes them extraordinary is something else: the naturalness of the voice, a vocabulary and a tone so “spoken” that the minute you finish a poem you want to read it again, just to see how he did it.

Library Journal

After reading the deceptively simple poems in this retrospective from Barnes, who died in 2000, it 's hard to understand why he's not better known. Often reflecting his California background, the poems can recall Robinson Jeffers, though they're not so grandiose. There's a quiet grandeur here and much to appreciate. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781590511671
Publisher: Other Press, LLC
Publication date: 4/6/2005
Edition description: New Edition
Pages: 168
Product dimensions: 5.20 (w) x 8.20 (h) x 0.40 (d)

Meet the Author

Dick Barnes

Dick Barnes was born in San Bernadino, California, in 1932. Educated at Pomona, Harvard, and the Claremont Graduate School, he taught medieval and renaissance literature at Pomona for nearly forty years. He published several volumes of poetry and translations. He died in May, 2000.

Robert Mezey

Robert Mezey is an eminent poet, translator, critic, and editor. His books include the Lamont Prize-winning The Lovemaker (1960) and Collected Poems 1952-1999 (2000). He lives in Pomona, California.

	Lynx Rufus showed me the way	3
	Hatauva	4
	The longing of the soul for absence	5
	Rakestraw Coyne and Boyle	6
	Survivors along Poplar Street in San Bernardino	7
	Being careful back then	8
	Alfalfa	10
	The time of the tumbleweeds	12
	"At Barstow"	14
	Not his fault, his misfortune	15
	A song for Charlie	16
	A Visit to lonesome John : autumn coming	18
	A lake on the Earth : the swarm	33
	Up home where I come from	37
	Every man his own cross	39
	Audacity	40
	Trolling : the truth by touch	41
	Clearing the way	42
	Being up there during the world war	45
	Learning death	46
	Dusk Was falling	48
	Example and admonition	50
	Few and far between	51
	Willie boy	54
	Helendale : waiting by the Mojave River	56
	Bees in the blossoms	58
	Alluvium : a reply	59
	September, 1950	60
	Goodbye big Ed	61
	Bill Munsen, an elegy	62
	The Mojave in March	64
	Another part of the desert	65
	A word like fire	67
	This world	69
	Another September	70
	Sturnus Vulgaris	71
	On a painting by David Hockney	72
	Thin ice	73
	Shoot out	74
	Con los Hombres a Robar, con los Cabrones ni al Agua	75
	Bagdad Chase Road in July	76
	Granite intrusive	79
	The Silver Dollar in Boron	80
	Omega over the north Mojave	81
	To a horn in York minster	82
	Trophy hunt (for the way things used to be)	83
	Santana	85
	Erles	86
	Adam cast forth	88
	Song : Mojave narrows	89
	A story in blue	90
	Pomona laundresses	91
	A child who is not likable	92
	An old story	93
	To a dime	95
	Bare house blues	96
	Rain	97
	Age and vigilance	98
	Family group snapshot	99
	The burial of the dead	100
	Chrysanthemums	101
	My neighbors	103
	Elegy on a spider	104
	Be with me, beauty	106
	A habitat group	107
	Ballad of Billy Fidenza	109
	Doctor knows best	111
	For Mac McCloud and his Bemis sonnets	112
	William Stafford	113
	To a Saxon poet	114
	Skip stone	115
	Luke XXIII	117
	De Imagine Mundi	119
	Welcome Street	120
	Chuang Tzu and Hui Tzu	121
	John I, 14	122
	Near Arles, 1912 : fame	123
	Texas	124
	Corceca	125
	Elizabeth Coatsworth in Hermosillo	126
	Geneva, 1916	128
	Proteus	130
	Midgarthormr	131
	Mister Nixon making history	132
	A pantoum for Anselm Kiefer	133
	A fresco at San Fortunato, Todi	135

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Word like Fire: Selected Poems

Overview

More About This Book

Overview

Editorial Reviews

The New Yorker

Library Journal

Product Details

Meet the Author

Table of Contents

Customer Reviews

Rating Distribution

5 Star

4 Star

3 Star

2 Star

1 Star

Your Rating:

Your Recommendations:

Barnes & Noble.com Review Rules

Reviews by Our Customers Under the Age of 13

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