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Bright Body
"For Aliki Barnstone, poetry seems a natural medium. The vision and cadences of these poems suggest a sensibility for which poetry is as inevitable as breathing or eating."—Robert Pinsky In Bright Body , Aliki Barnstone seeks to unite mind and body, spirit and matter, the individual and the body politic. Many of the poems are set in Las Vegas, a monument to materialism. This city of extremes informs Barnstone's vision and serves as a backdrop for her meditations on American history, war, the environment, erotic love, and the love of mother and child. Aliki Barnstone is a poet, translator, and critic.
96 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2011
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 3, 2011
I can feel Aliki in these poems and feel her joy and her despair in these poems. I love this woman and I'm proud of her work. She's an amazing poet, translator and human being.
July 19, 2022
4.25 stars
Perhaps my favorite part about the collection was how it happened to interact with material that I had very recently been teaching, and thus thinking about deeply, for the first time, as with "Back East Out West with Roger Williams," "Her Scarlet Letters," the quotes from Henry David Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" in "Civil Disobedience, New Year's, 1980," and Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Experience" in "Idealism," the mention of Cotton Mather in "On the Eastern Seaboard with Diane DiPrima.
The collection holds together well, it's topics varying from car rides through LA , guilt about the luck of privilege--and survivor's guilt, 9/11, war, the love between a mother and child, sexual desire, etc. Because I've also been thinking a lot about place given some of my other reading material lately (thin places, a ghost in the throat, embrace fearlessly the burning world) and this is a collection that's rooted in the city that the poet calls home, including the opening "You Pray to Rain Falling in the Desert," the only poem that stands outside one of three sections, "The Village in the Matchbox," "Congress," and the titular "Bright Body."
My favorite poems were "The Storm," "Invitation to a Poet," and "A Field of War," with honorable mentions to
"I Don't Grow Wings, I Drive my Car," "A Las Vegas Dust Storm," "Back East Out West with Roger Williams," "Alice's Alphabet," "Emily Dickinson in Las Vegas," "Civil Disobedience, New Year's, 1980," "Idealism," "In the Optometrist's Waiting Room," "My Friend Steve Asks if I Believe in the Afterlife," "You Hate Windchimes," "Photo Op," "When I Think of the Hand," and "Freeway Love Poem."
"The Storm" weaves in and out in a haunting way with lines from "Mary Had a Little Lamb," and just doesn't seem effective to quote in part here; it will lose its entire essence.
From "Invitation to a Poet":
We can string our tears across the room. We can drive fast
eluding all radar or play a game of dangerous communions
with an uncanny set of synchronous pasts
or we can thumb our noses at jealous gods, but please,
please come flying.
With the language of the hand stroking the earlobes
of the mountains, with nouns growing legs and arms
and dancing all around you,
please come flying
From "A Field of War":
Now your shoes and his are mudcaked,
stuck with hay, hastily untied, kicked-off, askew,
filled with ghosts of you, the vandals
who pulled up all the surveyors' stakes
in the field that despite you will be
houses and driveways on streets
named for what they destroyed to build:
Sycamore, Meadowbluff, Fair Oak.
They destroy the village to save it. *
*plays with a famous quote about the Tet offensive, perhaps even about My Lai.
Perhaps my favorite part about the collection was how it happened to interact with material that I had very recently been teaching, and thus thinking about deeply, for the first time, as with "Back East Out West with Roger Williams," "Her Scarlet Letters," the quotes from Henry David Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" in "Civil Disobedience, New Year's, 1980," and Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Experience" in "Idealism," the mention of Cotton Mather in "On the Eastern Seaboard with Diane DiPrima.
The collection holds together well, it's topics varying from car rides through LA , guilt about the luck of privilege--and survivor's guilt, 9/11, war, the love between a mother and child, sexual desire, etc. Because I've also been thinking a lot about place given some of my other reading material lately (thin places, a ghost in the throat, embrace fearlessly the burning world) and this is a collection that's rooted in the city that the poet calls home, including the opening "You Pray to Rain Falling in the Desert," the only poem that stands outside one of three sections, "The Village in the Matchbox," "Congress," and the titular "Bright Body."
My favorite poems were "The Storm," "Invitation to a Poet," and "A Field of War," with honorable mentions to
"I Don't Grow Wings, I Drive my Car," "A Las Vegas Dust Storm," "Back East Out West with Roger Williams," "Alice's Alphabet," "Emily Dickinson in Las Vegas," "Civil Disobedience, New Year's, 1980," "Idealism," "In the Optometrist's Waiting Room," "My Friend Steve Asks if I Believe in the Afterlife," "You Hate Windchimes," "Photo Op," "When I Think of the Hand," and "Freeway Love Poem."
"The Storm" weaves in and out in a haunting way with lines from "Mary Had a Little Lamb," and just doesn't seem effective to quote in part here; it will lose its entire essence.
From "Invitation to a Poet":
We can string our tears across the room. We can drive fast
eluding all radar or play a game of dangerous communions
with an uncanny set of synchronous pasts
or we can thumb our noses at jealous gods, but please,
please come flying.
With the language of the hand stroking the earlobes
of the mountains, with nouns growing legs and arms
and dancing all around you,
please come flying
From "A Field of War":
Now your shoes and his are mudcaked,
stuck with hay, hastily untied, kicked-off, askew,
filled with ghosts of you, the vandals
who pulled up all the surveyors' stakes
in the field that despite you will be
houses and driveways on streets
named for what they destroyed to build:
Sycamore, Meadowbluff, Fair Oak.
They destroy the village to save it. *
*plays with a famous quote about the Tet offensive, perhaps even about My Lai.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews