Rick Barot, _The Galleons_

 I THINK I first read Rick Barot way back in 2006, when a group of his poems led off the Legitimate Dangers anthology. I don't recall those samples making an impression on me at the time, but in the last few years, in one periodical or another, I kept coming across poems of Barot's that I liked, so...why not try one of his collections?

This one is from 2020 (a new one came out in 2024). The collection's title (also the title of ten individual poems within) refers to the Spanish ships that carried the spoil and pillage of empire across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans to Spain. Barot was born in the Philippines, one of the places despoiled and pillaged (not only by Spain, but also by the U.S.A. after 1898), and many of the poems look at his and his family's relationship to the history.

I tend not to expect elegance from poetry collections with this kind of thematic content, but that's the word that kept coming to my mind. Monica Youn puts it well in one of the blurbs on the back cover: "Rick Barot brings his understated virtuosity and perceptual sensitivity to bear on issues of postcolonialism, representation, memory, and grief." The themes ("postcolonialism, representation, memory, and grief") are what might land this book on a syllabus, but its elegance ("understated virtuosity and perceptual sensitivity") is what kept pulling me in. 

All the poems are in unrhymed couplets, the syntax poised, the imagery clean and telling, as in these lines on spring:

The blooms called forth by a bare measure of warmth,

days that are more chill than warm, though the roots must

know, and the leaves, and the spindly trunks ganged up

by the trash bins behind our houses. The blue pointillism

in morning fog. The blue that is lavender. The blue that is

purple. The smell that is the air's sugar, the sweet

weight when you put your face ear, the way you would

put it near the side of someone's head. Here the ear.

Here the nape.

                       ("The Names")

That spring feeling of a "bare measure of warmth," the exactness of "spindly trunks ganged up," the swerve to the Seurat allusion, the "air's sugar" that turns to an evocation of eros. So good. And I literally, no kidding, just opened up the book at random to find that passage. It's that good all the way through.