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Exile
Anita Barrows' Exile is a series of 93 poems with a central female character whose mind and spirit we follow. It is not exactly a narrative, though we learn more and more about the woman's life as the series goes on. We learn she is an exile from some unnamed country, though the Middle East appears to be the main landscape. The poems are serious, dark, and mostly short. The woman is not only an exile; she has lost most everything that grounded her and is struggling to find herself; memories swirl around her, vivid imagery haunts her, her past, her present. This is a book of the maniacal insanity of war and how it seeps in and destroys the innocents, the non-combatants.
106 pages, Paperback
Published February 7, 2015
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August 30, 2016
This small book of short narrative interlocking poems invites all kinds of oxymorons: ferocious tenderness, extravagant simplicity, sweet bitterness. Through them Barrows draws us ever more deeply into the rich, fragile, indomitable inner life of her exile (a woman in mid-life, a mother, a lover), and into her memories of the fragrant, fruitful lost world of pre-war Palestine. Or so I believe. It might be Iraq, Iran or Syria, or any of our world's many ravaged places. The horror, futility, and arrogance of war are the dark canvas on which Barrows paints the verdant fields, shattered villages, and ghostly companions of the woman's past. Through them she creates a profound opening of the heart.
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