“I used to think that to write poems, to make art, / meant trying to transcend the prosaic elements // of the self, to arrive at some essential plane, where / poems were supposed to succeed. I was wrong,” writes Rick Barot at the ending of the final poem of his fourth book of poems, The Galleons. This is one of several apparent ars poetica in this gorgeous book in which the speaker questions his assumptions about the art. “The Flea” begins, “At a certain point I stopped and asked / what poems I could write, which were different // from the poems I wanted to write, with the wanting / being proof that I couldn’t write those poems, that they // were impossible.” This is a writer in the midst of change — about his thinking about poetry, his writing process, and the world around him. As readers, we’re lucky to witness this live petri dish of mental acrobatics. Barot is well-known and respected by practicing poets — his work has slowly but surely grown like an intricate web — radius by radius, thread by thread, image by image, into something much larger than each piece. His fourth book allows the reader to begin to see the shape of the whole and it’s nothing short of breathtaking.
Barot’s new book spans and stretches across continents, history, and personal history. For the poet who has written lyric poems with the precision of a needle and thread, this new book feels broader, looser in syntax. We’re still lucky enough, though, to experience the laser-focused eye that Barot is known for, but in The Galleons he tugs more on his background and history (he was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area). The prestige of detail is still here but, in The Galleons the reader can also sense that Barot has traveled even farther in his mind. His poems reveal the eye of a painter combined with the mind of a roving archaeologist. He has a paintbrush and a camera.
In Barot’s earlier books, arresting images scatter throughout the poems. In “At Point Reyes” in his first book, The Darker Fall (Sarabande Books, 2002), there are “finger bones / of driftwood,” poppies are “furled / into bullets,” and a pair of glasses are described as “an insect-leg / tangle of rusted wires.” In “The Wooden Overcoat” in Chord (Sarabande Books, 2015), a coffin is described as a “wooden overcoat” and is so beautiful that “it was like the chandelier lighting / the room where treaties are signed.” But in each of Barot’s books, poem by poem, stitch by stitch, image by image, silk thread by thread, things have begun to elongate. In The Galleons, the poems are now stretching and traversing, much like the galleons in the book. Galleons were sailing ships used heavily by the Spanish kingdom in the 15th through 17th centuries, first for war, then for commerce (which is another kind of war). These stately ships with grand square sails rigged on masts serve as the figures in the book. Ten galleon poems are dispatched throughout the collection like ships, sailing through the book, wending in and out, up and down, each slightly different than the next. In “The Galleons 1,” the poem begins with a pronoun:
Her story is a part of something larger, it is a part
of history. No, her story is an illumination
of history, a matchstick lit in the black seam of time.
Or no, her story is separate
from the whole, as distinct as each person is distinct
from the stream of people that led
to the one and leads past the one …
The “her” in this poem likely refers to the speaker’s grandmother, who in the first poem in the book, “The Grasshopper and the Cricket,” is simply referred to as a “ninety-year-old woman / in front of a slot machine in a casino in California.” There’s a caginess in the speaker when naming people in this collection, not to subordinate human figures to the particular, but perhaps to articulate that humans span — they are a “part of something larger,” shards of history. How quickly the speaker opposes his own thinking though, with the poem’s string of “or’s.” The speaker grapples with the role of the individual in history—is the individual a part of history, an illumination of history, separate from history, surrounded by history, contradicting history? In every single poem in The Galleons, the reader gets to witness the miraculous movements of the speaker’s mind, as if walking inside a giant grandfather’s clock, following the intricacies of the moving of time, all those gears, cranks, pendulums. “The Galleons 1” eventually shifts to an actual galleon where the “she” returns: “She is on another ship, centuries later, on a journey // eastward that will take weeks across the same ocean.” The poem ends like this: “Here is a ship, an ocean. / Here is a figure, her story a few words in the blue void.” The poems in The Galleons reluctantly and loosely hint at narrative, as if knowing that one human’s story means everything and also nothing.
Despite the horizontal breadth in The Galleons, numerous poems retain an acute verticality into precise detail and memory, though what’s remembered isn’t always what’s expected. These details counter the spread, creating a kind of tension, the way one must simultaneously pull a fitted bedsheet across and down to achieve a kind of tightness and tension for the sheet to stay on. “The Blink Reflex” begins:
I have this notion that if you live long enough,
there are three or four great stories that you will have in your life.
A story of a journey or a transformation.
A story of love, which will likely mean the loss of love, a story
of loss. And a story of spiritual illumination,
which, for many, will probably be the moment of death itself …
After this carefully constructed multi-layered argument, the speaker does what he does in many of the poems — he debunks his own thinking: “I have believed long enough in my notion/to know that it is a romantic notion, that it erodes each time // I realize that the shard and not the whole/comprises a life, the image and not the narrative.” This admission unlocks the speaker’s mind and poem into a beautiful string of narrative journeys:
… Otherwise,
there’s no reason why all I remember of the airplane
I took as a child from one country to another
is the moist towelette packet we were given with our meal,
the wonder and absurdity of it. Or that, in love,
high in a tree in the dark, and high, he and I sat in the rain-damp
branches and ate 7-11 donuts …
This poem reminds me of Robert Hass’s seminal “Meditation at Lagunitas” in the way the speaker is working through and arguing against an assumption through imagery. One might think the name of the countries would be important or the name of the “he” in the intimate moment up in the tree, but none of those details are given. Instead, the speaker remembers and points the camera at the moist towelette and the 7-11 donuts, as if to say the image makes a life, not the narrative. The rest of the poem is steeped in heartbreaking memory, nostalgia, and curiosity as the speaker searches online for the “he.” The poem starts with ideas, then argues against those ideas with narrative details, then expands back into history to try and find what is lost. Each poem in this complex book performs a similar act, like a busy little spider traversing the web with images, facts, memories, as the speaker links them, unlinks them, re-thinks them, reflects, re-reflects, and then unravels them all.
The Galleons is ultimately about the speaker’s many journeys — from the Philippines, as a descendant of his grandmother, as a writer, a thinker, a lover, and a human. Barot’s endings too, have journeyed far across his four books. Barot has been a master of the stunning, yet tidy imagistic ending — but the endings in The Galleons defy closure; they are more expansive and less exact, less filled with knowing, and less controlled. In “The Blink Reflex,” the ending is a list of the films that “he” has made as a producer of TV documentaries. The poem ends with a kind of open untidiness:
… A film about fisherman, the harsh fishing
season in Alaska. A film about Abraham Lincoln
and a film about the last days of Adolf Hitler.
A film about the Sherpas who go up and down the Himalayas.
Many of the poems still end in imagery like the Sherpas going up and down the Himalayas, but the poems feel more uneasy, less worked over, and more comfortable in their uncertainty, their ghostly links. There’s an invisible thread across fishing, Lincoln, Hitler, and Sherpas, but we’re allowed as readers to link those ghosts on our own. Similarly, in “The Girl Carrying a Ladder,” the poem ends with an image, but there’s a larger concern here. The poem collides capitalist objects such as a $175,000 punching bag with a “Palestinian girl who carries a ladder / with her each morning when she goes to school.” Modern-day schoolgirls also enter the poem and carry heavy backpacks, “so heavy it looks like they are carrying the world on their backs,” as the poem ends. The poem traverses the speaker’s desire for an expensive object, to the desire of the girl who wants to attend school so earnestly that she carries a ladder, to the contemporary girls, and back again. The poem, in the end, becomes something larger than each element through this skillful interweaving.
The Galleons is, in the end, a little more of everything. Isn’t that what aging and maturing are — not necessarily becoming more this or that, but more of everything so that everything is stretching more (and I’m not referring to the waistline here) — vertically, horizontally, diagonally, away from the self, toward the self, into history and back, into the unknown, into the void. What fortunate readers we are to have a window into Barot’s eye, mind, and soul. As a reader, I’ll follow this poet anywhere, even if it is straight into the void. At least I know it will be a surprising and visual adventure.
[Published by Milkweed Editions on February 11, 2019, 88 pages, $16.00 softcover]
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