I’ve made no secret of the fact that I like InsideOut: Poems by L.L. Barkat. (Disclosure: she’s a friend, but I like the poems anyway.) (:)) If you’ve been reading InsideOut, have you seen/experienced/felt/been impressed by/had your socks blown off by/ any particular poem?
If you have, leave a comment here, along with any thoughts you might have about that particular poem, and we’ll put together a summary (or perhaps a series of summaries) as an official post.
I’ve read InsideOut twice, and I have several “favorites.” Actually, if truth be told, they’re all personal favorites. One is “Foyer,” and it starts this way:
Who looks
at the new straw
hat, remembering
grandma,…
And why is this a favorite for me? Because my paternal grandmother, who died in 1984 at the age of 95 and whom I dearly loved, wore a straw hat when she worked outside in the garden. The poem catapulted me back to childhood, when I would spend a week with her each summer, just the two of us. The poem opened up a flood of good memories.
So – do you have a favorite yet? And why?
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The Winter section of InsideOut is my favorite, and within that section are poems I’ve read again and again:
“Senility”, which conveys beautifully in just 15 lines the poet’s poignant watching of her self being disappeared as aunt, mother, and grandmother suffer “forgetfulness… encroaching”. (“I remember/ when I existed/ in more than just a /scrap of your mind. . . .”)
“In Your Dream”, with its wonderful sing-song quality, like a beloved nursery rhyme whose words belie what is or comes to be.
“Disappearance”, a perfect evocation of loss (“It is not just / your voice that/ one day // evaporated // ….”).
The understanding in “Hibernate” that we have to go through darkness, the long nights of winter, to emerge into light, into day, into grace.
“Instructions”, which conveys all the ordinariness of life, which goes on, must go on, even as death pulls you up short and knocks the breath out of you.
Throughout InsideOut, it is the spareness of the poems – the few words used in each – that is so striking when contrasted with the emotional punch you feel when you’ve reached the last lines.
There is nothing studied about the poems; they are rich with every-day details of life but the life is not just observed and described; it’s turned over, re-imagined, and re-experienced . . . and so pulls us in.
ergh – you all are making it very hard for me not to have this book!
if sunflowers
touched us lightly
as pollen on a
blue day, would we not
care again, dream.
ummmm…so many I am enjoying. I haven’t quite finished caressing my way through. I recognize some, and I greet them like old friends–they, all the more specials for their familiarity. These words, from Verse, breathe softly in my ear today:
…
I guess it must
be marks on tender
skin, bearers of sin,
cool cups of rain
and bottles of tears
collected on midnight
trains from eyes
of old men, old women
…
beautiful.
I have little torn pieces of paper marking favorites throughout my first read. They are:
Disappearance – pg. 57
The Watching – pg. 73
and pg. 83 (not title), below:
Curry leaf
floats, curls
‘midst black onion
seeds, brown sauce,
and I taste
your love.
and finally but none are least…
In Lieu of the New York Times – pg. 84
All of these bring memories for me. I love the whole work!!