The Darker Fall: Poems - Softcover

Barot, Rick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1889330736 ISBN 13: 9781889330730

Publisher: Sarabande Books, 2002

Synopsis

Winner of the 2001 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry.

"Barot’s mature linguistic skills really come down to a metaphorical and musical intelligence that refuses to value one element over another, that will not let the language or the longing take over."—From the Foreword by Stanley Plumly

"This is a book of lyric wonders: wit that turns dark, darkness that blazes up again in music and story."—Eavan Boland Rick Barot is currently Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University. He was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. He attended Wesleyan University, the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, and Stanford, where he was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow in Poetry.

About this title

About the Author

Rick Barot was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay. His first book, The Darker Fall, was the winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry published by Sarabande. In 2001, he received a poetry fellowship from the NEA. He currently teaches at Warren Wilson College and at Pacific Lutheran University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Sublet, Pitt Street

The graininess of humid heat, steady to
her windowbox, parsley gone riot.
And each marigold a ruched density
caught in nettings of dill. The window,

immovably half-closed. Though cries
from the park pool, a cool depth smelling
of acetone at dark. Though the upswept
gingko leaves, pestered into notice

just before a storm's hard collapse.
This month, I sleep and wake to objects
assigned someone else's manners.
Given winters, the face of fear among

her three African masks, its white eyes,
cage-bar teeth. In a box, spring's silk
scarves. Year-round Christmas lights
on the bed's canopy. And in the photographs

room after room, her mother fading
into approximateness, older, then even
older, the face bones overexpressed
by age. Exhausted by heat some nights,

I have marked that difference frame to
frame, wished a means of telling
what occupied her living in between,
and arrived only at my afternoon radio's

melancholy, some onions on a plate,
a sunset left in the sky like eyeshadow
on a lid. What she knew of need
imagined now as our own need, continuing,

the way our grocer's plantains, our street's
boombox merengue, stand for
what the tenement museum, blocks
from here, remembers: A yellowed letter's

Send word. The man cross-armed, posed
before his new store. And the glance
of light from the camera's flash,
touching on each sleeper on the floor.

Edition details

• Publisher: Sarabande Books
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1889330736
• ISBN 13: 9781889330730
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 84