HAVING READ BARNETT’S other collections, I decided to go back and read the first, first published in 2004. My copy looks to be from the fourth printing, which is doing better than okay, I would say.
Barnett’s hallmarks are already present here in her first book; the poems are lucid and subtle, take short but striking lyric flights, and feel honest.
A good many of the poems in the first part of the book seem to be about the death of two nieces in a terrible plane crash. A few minutes of internet search suggest to me that the nieces may have been on Alaska Airlines flight 261, which fell into the Pacific after “a catastrophic loss of pitch control,” according to Wikipedia.
As in Barnett's other collections, we get some good poems about her son, who at this point seems to have been in the toddler/pre-schooler era.
Barnett’s poems don’t dazzle, I would say, but one can keep coming back to them and they are just as good as one remembers them.
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