reviewed on May 18, 2025

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Rarely does a writer so thoughtfully complicate and refocus his thinking from one book to the next as Rick Barot has done in the almost five-year gap between The Galleons and Moving the Bones. 

 

The former, named after the ships of Spanish colonialism, and concerned in large part with the effects of European imperialism in the western hemisphere, looks outward to place and history, framing present experience in wide-angle scope.  “Her story is part of something larger,” Barot writes of his grandmother in that book, “it is a part / of history.” 

 

In the latter, Barot not only zooms in—to the small, the domestic, the inward—but problematizes the ethical consequences of doing so, asking how one might and what it means to privilege romantic love, for instance, or “the half hour of sun that slanted into one side of my room, the light like a giant wing” over and against what we might think of as civic engagement.  As Barot puts it, “the work // of poetry is the work of preserving the fact of the beloved the you of / the beloved the work of poetry is preserving the face of the beloved.”  Or, making the argument by inversion: “‘The poem is the speech of citizenship,’ a scholar wrote.  And I laughed.”

 

One can imagine the objections to such indulgence.

 

Barot’s investment in the interior and apolitical, however, registers not as a rejection of public life but as a re-consideration of what one means by “public,” to the point that the book would refuse, I suspect, the very notion of the “apolitical.”  Even our most intimate moments, suggests Moving the Bones, should be viewed as in stereoscope, set alongside everything that they exclude.  What prompts this re-consideration for Barot is the disruption, during the COVID-19 pandemic, of the relation between inside and outside, private and public space, an idea he pursues in one of the best responses to the pandemic I have seen: a long-poem consisting of thirty sections of prose poems.

 

I know, I know—it sounds unbearable.

 

It is in fact magnificent.

 

In “During the Pandemic,” Barot develops a radical re-scaling of the public, narrowing his consideration to the neighborly and near-at-hand.  “During the pandemic, I thought of scale,” he writes, in justified blocks I do not reproduce here.  “During the pandemic, I knew each neighbor by one thing.”

 

                                                                                                                      The

            neighbors above, the baby.  The neighbors below, the dog.

            Someone down the hall, fried fish.  Someone else down the hall,

            the opera when their door opened.  I made my rooms quieter

            by standing in the middle of each one, my mind moving

            intently, like an old man in slippers […]
 

This is a poetics of intimacy and inwardness, and one that recognizes, moreover, the hubris involved in lavishing one’s attention on the humble.  In the excellent early poem “The Streets,” Barot considers his partner’s participation in a protest to which he himself does not go.  “Because I was sick / and couldn’t go there,” he writes, “I had the luxury / of seeing the woman as an image. […] He saw the tents people lived in / by the park get torched, and I could smell / on him what he had seen.”  Throughout Moving the Bones, Barot invokes smell as the most intimate of senses, using it here to suggest that art itself depends on the privilege of distance.  As his partner arrives home by public transportation, Barot thinks “of the bus the way I thought of poems, that it / was a civic space and a lyric space at once. / I knew not to say any more about what / I was only imagining.  He turned and went / to the other room, to wash his hands and face.”  One gets a sense here of Barot’s ability to think via imagery, in an end-of-poem door-slam evocative of the last shot of The Godfather and of Wittgenstein’s adage that “that of which we cannot speak we must pass over in silence.”

 

His re-scaling to the small and sensuous, and to the silent, does involve Barot in a certain amount of preciosity, as when he “stood before the linden tree by the parking lot / on campus, asking it what it had seen // during the year everyone disappeared.”  “One more way of being hidden,” he writes in another poem, “is to close so completely you contain // the world’s dreaming, the skies / of that sleep glowing like nacre: faintly blue, / as though it were water, / faintly pink, the eyeshadow of spring.”  This is Mary-Oliver-manqué, though more often Barot’s closeness of attention comes gorgeously rendered, as in a still life. 

 

Though he privileges the sense of smell, moreover, his ear for the relation between line and rhythm, and therefore meaning, is expertly tuned, with long lines in long poems moving through multiple modulations:

 

            When we weren’t talking about those things

 

we were talking about poetry, beside ourselves

when reading out loud the Larkin poem

 

about how parents fuck you up, whisperingly

amazed reading Dickinson’s poem about

 

how things fall apart in an exact, organized

decay […]

 

That third line is as beautiful as Ed Hirsch’s unforgettable “a lovely line a little loathsome // I loved that poem once,” and indeed I love a lot of the poems in Moving the Bones, a smart, mature collection from a writer whom we should now consider among the nation's very best poets.