Life’s Shapes and Patterns
2015; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 37; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/abr.2015.0133
ISSN2153-4578
Autores Tópico(s)Architecture and Cultural Influences
ResumoLife’s Shapes and Patterns Elizabeth Kim (bio) Kaleidoscope Tina Barr Iris Books www.irisbooks.com 90Pages; Print, $15.00 Tina Barr’s second full-length collection of poems, Kaleidoscope, not only renders its titular instrument into a metaphor for the shapes and patterns of everyday life, but also uses it as a kind of lens through which she sees the world. Just like a kaleidoscope, where the point at which the shapes and turns begin or end is indistinguishable, the images circulating throughout the poems appear only to direct our view to another direction. Whether through birds that swoop into the final lines of poems unannounced, flowers that move like mouths, or butterflies that become prayers, Barr invites readers to focus our vision on these seemingly ordinary details—perhaps with one eye held shut and the other eye wide open—in order to recognize that though there may be a perceptible design to daily experiences, that design is an intricate and ever-changing one that never ceases to turn, surprise, and confound. Section I opens with “In the Kaleidoscope’s Chamber” in which Barr describes the bits and pieces within the gadget, remarking that “the mind feeds on pattern, incites us to find it.” Incite may at first ring as a rather forceful word, but as the poem continues, delineating that “The chamber fills with purple, / blue bruises, the open jaw of a dead father, / multiplies the tight eyes of liars,” the reader realizes that even what is visually pleasing can trigger disturbing cognitive associations. There is no telling where the mind will wander. In fact, by the end of the poem, those images dissipate as the colors evoke memories of trinkets from childhood and as the speaker begins to hear her husband play the piano. As the section moves from poem to poem, the blues of a jazz singer gives way to the blue of a fawn from fairy tales while a red bird in a Lorenzetti painting calls to mind the blood of the Hutu and Tutsis conflict. Barr’s poems trace the erratic shifts of the thinking process, never weighing down her lines with heavy-handed segues or explanations. After all, the mind has no rhyme or reason for what holds its attention at any given moment; it simply holds it. Barr reveals another turn in her kaleidoscope in section II through a series of ekphrastic poems that focus on the work of outsider artist Henry Darger, whose illustrations blur the line between the innocent and the perverse. As Barr articulates in “Henry Darger Comes to Lakebottom Park,” “his mind upturned scenes / you and I see in dreams” because the images are as quaint as they are unsettling. Darger’s work illustrates idyllic scenes of young girls, some clothed in pinafore dresses, others in nothing at all; some have horns while others have butterfly wings. As strange and surreal as these works are, Barr’s poems do not completely distance the “I” from Darger’s vision. “Our Cleaning Lady’s Son” demonstrates a kind of symmetry or mirroring of its two stanzas, the first of which recalls the speaker’s memory of forcing a young boy to expose himself and the second of which describes Darger’s androgynous illustrations of children. Later, an eerie parallel between the viewer of the art and the art itself becomes evident in the final lines of “The Guardians of Chocolate” which abruptly states, “My grandmother paid for a maid, so we weren’t alone with her son.” Here, the diction is simple but controlled as it indicates the disassociation of the “I” from the lustful father mentioned in the poem, “Jailbait,” directly before it. In contrast, many of the poems in the following section suggest a longing for an absent mother. While in poems like “Thieves” and “Pilgrim” Barr shifts the readers’ view to Egypt, where colors, textures, and shapes flood the streets as they do these poems, others take place in Mississippi and Tennessee. In “Golden Moon Casino,” Barr transcribes a morbid yet affectionate phone conversation between the speaker and her mother during which the former states, “I want you to die / in my arms.” When her mother expresses...
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