Rick Barot is one of the most elegant, graceful poets I have come across. And I have anticipated the release of his new book after having taught The Darker Fall many times over the years since its first release in 2002. I have always admired his attention to rhythm, to the line, and to the precision of his language. Barot’s carefully chiseled stanzas give the distinct impression that he’s sculpting, or carving out of wood a marvelous artifact, not wooden at all, but startling and expressive. Perhaps this is why a number of the poems in this new collection are in dialogue with artistic media: literature, film, painting, and even performance art.
K.
Now I am the least sorry thing in the room.
The dark huddling like trees against the walls,
the cold. The one candle is an affectation,
its almond-shaped tip flaring; the frost arrives
on the windows. I leave behind the white
noise of other rooms, cities, the books whose
inks pool to my lap when I am not careful.
Pale as a petal, I ask that the rope be put on
tighter, so that the bones of my ankles knock
into each other. My wrists kiss. I understand
the greed of the actress, her vanity made
important: how the rouge of some emotion
gets slowly placed on the cheek of nothing.
And I understand the martyr’s accepted
brokenness: no deliberation in the self now,
no more purpose left in his hands. Only
the pebbles pushing into his soles as he walks
on the path, the plinth of wood he is lifted
onto, the frank dryness of the sky. His head
tilts upward when the arrow breaks into
his thigh. Then the explosion on his cheek,
teeth crushed. And the deer in its shadow,
the deer in the cover away from the soldiers,
its mouth eating even the bark, even thorns.
Inspired by a single-line entry from Kafka’s Diaries: “I am supposed to pose in the nude for the artist Ascher, as a model for St. Sebastian,” this poem’s speaker is not Kafka but a shadow of Kafka, an imagined Kafka—K., the author of various literary masterpieces who might have indeed subjected himself to the request.
Enter Sebastian, captain of the Praetorian Guard during the early 3rd century. He was secretly a Christian in the Roman Empire, and once it was discovered he was converting many to Christianity, the Roman emperor Diocletian ordered that he be shot to death by archers. He survived the execution though not unscathed, only to be beaten to death after he presents himself before the emperor to denounce this cruelty.
St. Sebastian eventually became a favorite subject for the Italian painters in the Renaissance. And in the contemporary arena, he has become a symbol of male beauty and resistance to oppression, indeed an eroticized icon to the gay community. These sentiments come through in the familiar pose—the kissing wrists, the locked ankles—and then the total submission to the executioner, to the eye of the painter, who is capturing each penetration of the flesh. Painful, but not fatal.
The martyr’s trance, his elevated state into saintly suffering, holy and orgasmic, is captured stunningly by the second artist present here, the poet. And that final stroke, the detail of the deer, “its mouth eating even the bark, even thorns,” reflects the subject’s bliss, but also his burden.
Barot’s second collection is gorgeously conceived. That piquant title, might as well have been Desire or Yearning since there is much expression of need and appetite and hunger in these pages, and so too, fulfillment.
(From Want published by Sarabande Books, 2008. Used with the permission of the author.)
WEDNESDAY SHOUT BACK
Hey Rigo, this is a really fine review of really fine work from a really fine poet.
I am glad that you chose this book for a shout out. I have been reading it ever
since I’ve gotten my hands on it. It’s a book that you carry around awhile
because the artistry is so convincingly good that you don’t want to leave it
for fear of missing out on something that can make your own work better.
James