The Animal Gospels
Reviews & Blurbs
BRIAN BARKER’S ELEGANT EAR, schooled in the cadences of southern speech, is tuned to an intensely physical musicality. But of course euphony alone isn’t poetry; Barker bring his song to bear on difficulty, the desire to capture what can be held of happiness. Until, in the stunning final poem, “Monkey Gospel Floating Out to Sea,” his work pushes into bold new territory, his splendid rhythms both broken and fiercely alive, inescapable, rescuing fragments of a life into music.”
—Mark Doty
WHAT IS PAST AND WHAT IS PASSING, what is held onto and what if finally beyond our reach? In Brian Barker’s The Animal Gospels these secular concerns become the source of a strangely religious yearning, a great undercurrent of burden and mystery and praise. Yet what that yearning leads to is less mystical than demotic: the sun-bleached bones of a mockingbird, a clapperless keepsake bell, the smell of wood smoke in a lover’s hair. This is a beautiful and haunting first collection, and it makes one aware of how rare it is to hear a young poet sound the darker chords of what one poem calls “the slow revelation of time itself.”
IN BRIAN BARKER’S POETRY, a ravishing and hypnotic eloquence is undergirded by a staggering and intricate intelligence. One is assured, in these wide-ranging meditations, of the vernacular’s vitality and of the ephemeral’s miraculous radiance. The Animal Gospels is a luminous, expansive, exhilarating, and profound debut.
—Eric Pankey
BRIAN BARKER’S ELEGAICALLY MOVING POEMS remind us constantly that “gospel” derives from “god-spell,” the revelation of glad tidings that there exists a kingdom of heaven; that the world does not consist solely in the law of Old Testament dispensation. But these are secular tidings whose faith in immanence rests in language and earthly love, in the pleasure of new combinations, “winglisp” and “shadowchurn,” and the arresting simile: “gone and irretrievable like a few stray eyelashes / shed by a nightswimmer.” This poet is our nightswimmer who guides us through the animal gospels where Sisyphus busks for gum wrappers and pocket lint, and will never find grace, but where there are also little nameless acts of kindness and love–Shorty drilling through his friend’s blackening toenail to let the blood out. The Animal Gospels takes the echoing question who will remember us? and gives back an affirming peace.
—Lynne McMahon
A PURELY INNOCENT VOICE would not recognize our capacity for evil. A purely cynical one would talk of nothing else, and a fearful one would simply be silent. The Animal Gospels falls somewhere between. There is judgment here, but (as in Graham’s Overlord) it is almost always turned inward. To judge one’s past fairly, then, is to first acknowledge that one has already found some sort of redemption as an individual. It is to Barker’s credit that he seeks it in the language of the poem itself.
—Matthew Ladd, West Branch #60 (Spring/Summer 2007)
IN POEM AFTER POEM, Barker reaches for insight with the highest lyrical and narrative ambitions, moving within and between time and imagination, at all times examining the strange entanglement of elements that make us who we are. Like the “fizz and flash / of your spent filament” that briefly illuminates the “foggy-eyes stranger” in the mirror of “Self-Portrait With Burnt Out Light Bulb”—like that “smoky globe” which, when shaken, emits a “scarce, peculiar song of broken light”—it is the musical world that draws Barker to the poetic medium.
—Andy McFadyen-Ketchum, Crab Orchard Review, Spring 2008
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