The Darker Fall: Poems

by Rick Barot, Stanley Plumly (Foreword by)

Overview

Winner of the 2001 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry.

"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."—From the Foreword by Stanley Plumly

"This is a book of lyric wonders: wit that turns dark, darkness that blazes up again in music and story."—Eavan Boland Rick Barot is currently Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University. He was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. He attended Wesleyan University, the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, and Stanford, where he was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow in Poetry.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781889330730
Publisher:	Sarabande Books
Publication date:	10/01/2002
Edition description:	1ST
Pages:	84
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Rick Barot was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay. His first book, The Darker Fall, was the winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry published by Sarabande. In 2001, he received a poetry fellowship from the NEA. He currently teaches at Warren Wilson College and at Pacific Lutheran University.

Read an Excerpt

Sublet, Pitt Street The graininess of humid heat, steady to her windowbox, parsley gone riot. And each marigold a ruched density caught in nettings of dill. The window, immovably half-closed. Though cries from the park pool, a cool depth smelling of acetone at dark. Though the upswept gingko leaves, pestered into notice just before a storm's hard collapse. This month, I sleep and wake to objects assigned someone else's manners. Given winters, the face of fear among her three African masks, its white eyes, cage-bar teeth. In a box, spring's silk scarves. Year-round Christmas lights on the bed's canopy. And in the photographs room after room, her mother fading into approximateness, older, then even older, the face bones overexpressed by age. Exhausted by heat some nights, I have marked that difference frame to frame, wished a means of telling what occupied her living in between, and arrived only at my afternoon radio's melancholy, some onions on a plate, a sunset left in the sky like eyeshadow on a lid. What she knew of need imagined now as our own need, continuing, the way our grocer's plantains, our street's boombox merengue, stand for what the tenement museum, blocks from here, remembers: A yellowed letter's Send word. The man cross-armed, posed before his new store. And the glance of light from the camera's flash, touching on each sleeper on the floor.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	ix
	Foreword	xi
I.
	Reading Plato	3
	Eight Elegies	5
	Chroma	10
	Bird Notes	12
	Bonnard's Garden	16
	Botanicals	18
	Study	21
	Blue Hours	23
II.
	Riffing	29
	Passagework	31
	Sublet, Pitt Street	35
	Three Amoretti	37
	Nearing Rome	40
	Ocean Park Notebook	42
	The Gecko	45
	Portishead Notebook	47
III.
	Aubade	53
	Phantasmal Cities	55
	Montale	60
	Wittgenstein	62
	Interior with Extension Cord	66
	Photographing the Snow	68
	At Point Reyes	70
	Miro's Notebook	72
	The Author	77
	Previous Winners, The Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry	79

Foreword

"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

Editorial Reviews

"Though The Darker Fall opens with a poem entitled 'Reading Plato,' the poem, and the book, is 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

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

"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