Abraham Melamed,
The rabbi’s son,
became a New Christian
in the spring
of 1492,
a trickle of water
down his neck.The spare, factual first stanza, and the yawning space it creates, allows the reader to feel history as a crushing trickle of water on the neck.In “Rigging The Wind,” we come upon a Biblical-sounding first-person lamentation, a Judeo-converso, ca. 1470, that could as easily apply to Europe in the 1940s as to Spain in the 1500s.
Adonai, Adoname,
cover me, Oh Lord.If my neighbors hear
the sound of you in my mouth,
too late to turn me in—
this illness is my last.My wife and son
will need to pawn
some things from the house
but let them keep
the small book by the bed
that reminds us who we were.It was her delving into Jewish life in Medieval Spain, and its despairing hiddenness during the Inquisition, which first compelled Barber to explore her own “somewhat submerged Jewish identity,” having grown up in Boston in the ‘60s in a secular Jewish household. Her mother was a strong supporter of the Civil Rights movement, which inspired her to become a teacher in the poor, black neighborhood of Roxbury. Barber herself teaches English literature and creative writing at Suffolk University in Boston.You have the feeling of entering “Given Away” through a Japanese door. What is seen is seen sharply and precisely. Very Haiku-like. The works of some Western poets influenced by Haiku give off a strong derivative glare – a result of trying on the language of the East while being removed from the cultural refinements that shaped it. In Barber’s case nothing sounds borrowed. Everything is pared down, but nothing is inauthentic.Barber opens her poem “God Doesn’t Speak in the Psalms” with a freshness of expression that grabs your attention and holds it.And that’s what I like.A flock of psalms,
a deck, a pack,
shuffling praise
and fear and need.The poet ends with the lines:
an ear, a voice
coming apart between my hands.God doesn’t speak in the psalms—
God’s spoken to.Barber attributes her style’s origin not to any specific literary encounter, but to her laboring as a gymnast in her teens. Finding herself on a four inch-wide length of wood, a balance beam four feet off the ground, the movements she had to master in that space left no room for error.The challenge to her rigorous line constructs is the same. Her few words leave all that white space to bear witness to lines that don’t work.The microscopic world of Jewish minimalist poetry received a blow in 2011 with the death of Samuel Menashe, at age 85. Winner of the Neglected Masters Award, Menashe’s poetry was Books Poet Jennifer Barber presses so much music into so few words By Robert Hirschfield The Jewish minimalist The Jerusalem Report july 15, 2013 45 more overtly spiritual than Barber’s, and definitely less punctuated.Barber also writes of the soul. In “Given Away,” the poem “nefesh,” 16 lines long, trumps almost any Menashe poem in sheer length, while displaying more elusive imagery:
translated
in the margin note
as throat or gullet, soul—
place in
the windpipe where
breathing grows visible
and the mouth
gulps air,
hatchling
with an open beak,
a swift in mid-flight,
hunger that alights
with no
warning in the grass,
in the psalmist’s
O my soul.
In addition to writing poetry, Barber edits the literary magazine Salamander. She started the bi-annual publication in 1992 as a way of keeping in touch with the work of her contemporaries, and with the desire to give talented, little known writers a forum. It has featured such leading American poets as Jean Valentine and Linda Pastan, and the outstanding short story writer and novelist, Pulitzer Prize winning Jhumpa Lahiri. Its circulation of around 1,000 copies per issue is modest, but Salamander serves as one of the vital unnoticed cells in the American cultural body that keeps literature alive.When Barber turns in her work to epics like Gilgamesh (her “Reading Gilgamesh” is one of the final poems in “Given Away”), her treatment of the Godman’s cruelty and vanity, his quest for immortality, subverts the entire concept of the Great Myth by wrapping it in a slender scarf of humor and covering it over with the stark, storyless beauty of nature (the dates in the poem are the dates she spent reading Gilgamesh).2/19
A little bitterness
and snow
fall through
the branches of the spruce,
the radio
confirming snow,
the mind afloat
in the stop-bath of its pool.2/20
A woman waits by a well.The heart chugs in its bleached cave.I put the book down on the couch.2/25
North and south wind,
east and west,
green wind, groaning wind
summer thunder,
pitch-and-toss,
ice on the mizzen-mast,
demon wind,
lashing wind,
whirlwind, drowning wind.Barber presses so much music here into so few words. Not a beat is wasted. Assonance, hypnotic word repetition, rhyme, all merge within nature’s raging against the lonely chaos of the driven Gilgamesh.The tall hero,
struck with grief,
stumbles through the underworld.Israeli short-story writer, Etgar Keret, once said at a PEN talk in New York that he begins his stories wanting to write an “epic,” but what always emerges are just a few pages. Barber has carved out for herself a distinctive scale elastic enough to hold an epic comfortably, to hold almost anything comfortably, from the largeness of an archetype to the smallness of a specific emotion on a particular day:
Waking to
panic before
the darkness thins.The curtain stirs.The birds come down.What is it
Why am I
hanging strips of cloth