The late Dick Barnes' best work may have been his translations from Borges in league with Bob Mezey, but his own poems are also wonderful. Mezey has written of them: .....Metrical phrases and lines appear, sometimes a lot, sometimes a little, but naturally and subtly, like the rhymes, which are often internal, sometimes assonantal, almost always occasional, but used with telling effect......One sometimes sees this kind of completeness and authority in really good metrical verse; in this mode, where one is absolutely on his own, it is a small miracle. Dick Barnes earned the right to work in this mode by mastering the old craft, which rewarded him by refining what must have been a naturally good ear until it was a marvelous one..... What amazes me is that a man can write as well as Dick Barnes does and not be renowned for it.
Here's a Barnes poem, one of my favorites - a recollection from his childhood in the San Bernadino Mountains of California:
A Winter Day Before the War
Hidden a week in a blizzard, the sun
came out and glittered on the snow; the sky
was indigo. We went out to visit, Mother on snowshoes,
a few of us kids on skis, when the air was so sweet
it made you happy to breathe. We talked with two ladies
on their stoop where icicles shone and dripped
and went around Nellie Smith's gift shop to see
an icicle a foot thick on the north side of the house.
Nobody said that day was marvelous, but it must have been
if it can stand out that clear in the mind, and bright
when so many other days are forgotten
or marked by something that happened.
A day like that: well, who knows. Maybe any day.
G.
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