Reading at Open Books Tonight

April 10, 2008 07:30 PM
RICK BAROT
Coolly sensual and sharply reasoned, the poems of Rick Barot’s second collection, Want ($13.95 Sarabande), are quiet in tone but propelled by a muscular lyricism. “What is it to be here but to want?,” ends one, a line that evokes both desire and loss, the volume’s gracefully powerful themes. With a painter’s eye for color and detail (“this boy in the avocado / windbreaker, the sky the white / of pills”), Barot assembles art by disassembling experience, ever aware of the power of perception
-- “I love how emotion unraveled matter / into metaphor, the mouth a star, the elbow / a kingdom.” There is narrative here, but it is often elliptical, intimate yet at a remove -- “Tell each // story cold, I tell myself. Tell it dark ….Tell it without need of an answer.” But there is also great tenderness in these openhearted poems -- “Let the offered living hand / be an oar.”