Between Frames by Wendy Barker
Book design by David Ray Vance Cover image by Paul Berge |
ABOUT Wendy Barker Wendy Barker's collections of poetry include Poems from Paradise, Way of Whiteness, Let the Ice Speak and Winter Chickens, and a chapbook, Eve Remembers. Other books include Poems' Progress, Rabindranath Tagore: Final Poems (with SaranindranathTagore), Lunacy of Light: Emily Dickenson and the Experience of Metaphor, and (co-edited with Sandra M. Gilbert) The House Is Made of Poetry: the Art of Ruth Stone. Among her honors and awards are an NEA fellowship, a Rockefeller residence fellowship in Bellagio, the Mary Elinore Smith Poetry Award from The American Scholar, the Sourette Diehl Award for Literary Translation from the Texas Institute of Letters, the Violet Crown Book Award, and the Award for Literary Excellence from Gemini Ink. She teaches at the University of Texas at San Antonio. | |||||||||
ABOUT Between Frames by Wendy Barker "Wendy Barker's poems pulse with the life that's at the heart of trees, on the wings of birds, and inside movies and marriages. What a thrill to be in the presence of the abundant mystery and beauty in this wise and tender work." —Barbara Ras "Wendy Barker has an uncanny, exquisite way of shaping whole worlds with a few well-chosen words—lives falling apart and sparking together—an astonishing sequence of poems on chronic pain—the movies and pauses of our days—one reads her work and feels a clarity fall into place all around the moment. Barker shares this gift of poetry wondrously." —Naomi Shihab Nye
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WAS IT WHEN the rock band next door finally stopped, the first day in months not bound to someone else’s pitch, volume, starts, stops, rises, decibels? Even slicing lemons took a mustering of resistance against what pulsed, what permeated membranes of our walls, windows, double-paned, and useless. Was it then, when the boys stopped, that the birds returned? Chickadees, their quick darts—and the jays, jostling the feeder. Territories. Whose? This morning the cardinal, in the sun’s first silence, his chirr, chirr, chirr, chirr. Music. Announcement of turf: I am filling this space, I am a feathered pebble in a pool, I am rippling circles and circles of waves, I occupy more space than you can imagine, and as for you, you stay put. |
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