Word like Fire: Selected Poems

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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 ...

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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.
More Reviews (1) Fewer Reviews
From The Critics
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.

Table of Contents

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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