Description
first snow falling slow
hangs in the air
a curtain drifting there
thickening sight
—“Winter”
In this new collection, Douglas Barbour experiments with what he calls “rhythmically intense open form.” Listen. If presents technically innovative poetry that invites the reader to join in some serious play. Barbour’s vivid, ekphrastic poems engage an ongoing conversation among artworks—not only classic paintings but also popular music—while his lyric poems astutely, accessibly evoke places, moments, and feelings. This is poetry that takes up language both as the already-said and as a playground for brilliant technique. Leaping from love to landscapes, politics to jazz, Keats to Milne to Monk, these poems yearn to be spoken aloud for the pure joy of sound.
Reviews
# 8 on Edmonton Fiction Bestsellers list, April 23, 2017
"In Barbour’s latest, there are some elements familiar through much of his work, from meditations to memorials, his ongoing engagements with world politics, and lines and narrative-threads composed with breaks of breath in and among.... There is a precision that Barbour writes out in each short breath-take, clipped and clear, even as the accumulation of those words and phrases come together to form a narrative both distinct and nebulous." [Full post at http://robmclennan.blogspot.ca/2017/04/douglas-barbour-listen-if.html]
- rob mclennan
Listen. If is Douglas Barbour’s first book of poetry in over a decade and includes work that was produced over a twenty year period. That extended period of production has some interesting effects on the text.... The past becomes an ironic counterpoint to the present, a space where the concerns of the present are revealed not necessarily to be a repetition of the past so much as a series of re-iterations altered by task of memory. Lis]en. If is a book about memory and remembering. It is reflective and reflexive, a collection marked by meditation. The objects of meditation which include the seasons, love, art, jazz recordings, and memory shift throughout the book, but serve to ground the reader’s experiences in instances and talismans of remembering.... [W]orth reading.' Prairie Fire, May 30, 2018 [Full review at http://www.prairiefire.ca/listen-if-by-douglas-barbour]
- Ryan J. Cox