A Very Small World, and: How to Get There (review)

As J.T. Barbarese explains in his book, the title derives from a Hart Crane anecdote. "When Charlie Chaplin met Hart Crane in New York in 1926, they drank and talked the night through. Crane's biographer Paul Mariani reports Chaplin's saying to Crane, 'A poem is a letter to the world,' and Crane replying, 'A very small world.'"

In his letter to the very small world, Barbarese reports back his excursions into the big world, detailing its richness as well as its various impoverishments in finely crafted poems. His telling is also self-referential, revealing a poet – sometimes the observer, sometimes the participant – whose perceptions are idiosyncratic, often comically so, (especially his seeing), but always insightful and strikingly original.

Couplets allow Barbarese compression and the fluid quickness to change direction. The first four packed and slippery-quick couplets of the book's first poem, "Spring," tell us:

The nineteenth-century self hidden in the twentieth – goes shopping for signs of spring and elated by the sun and the sun's routines kneels before risen crocus and beds new bulbs. The cardinal reddens unwatched, the dust makes a paste of the sunlight, the bay-windows make the houses look pregnant, the streets have a migrainey brightness.

Since it is a hidden "nineteenth-century self" shopping (the twentieth century self's favorite pastime) for signs, we expect this photograph of the streets to have a grainy brightness, but "migrainey" prepares us for what is to come later, "all these nervous wrecks running their lives/like four-year old birthday parties. . . ."

"The bay-windows make the houses look pregnant" is one of those perceptions (which fill this collection) that is at first glance funny, but on second and third glance more complexly suggestive.

Victorian houses, we have all heard, were built to look as if they would stand forever as fortresses of the family. So Barbarese's houses indeed "look pregnant" with the next generation. Those future inhabitants, however, rarely took possession of their inherited property; instead, they pursued distant jobs, or abandoned the homestead through divorce, or preferred to time-share a condo – all of which further enrich the image of the "migrainey brightness" of the street.

A solitary triplet then settles, once and for all, the poet's evaluation of what he is seeing. These "nervous wrecks" have been "running their lives"

like four-year old birthday parties, and it's all so lush you want to spit your soul into the rose bush, repair the damage to the educational system. . . .

The poem concludes with a couplet that utterly alters, turns on its head, the high seriousness with which this paean to spring apparently begins. The spring clouds, those Shellean archetypes of the creative and renewing power of nature, slide "like party hats over the sun." Spring in these nineteenth century streets has become, in the twentieth, not lofty and inspiring, but childish, errant, and even goofy.

Barbarese comes back again and again, throughout the volume, to seeing – as perception, as understanding, as metaphor.

"When the Snow Fell," for instance, catalogs visual images of a snowfall. The poet sees the altered landscape imaginatively, and then, "shaking the sleep off" un-sees "such beauty thaw into fact." To shift perception through the range of possibilities, from the real to the fanciful, back and forth

is to see a street, your ordinary dream wither into life and tell a small story.

The long poem, "Postcard: 'Family, c.1950 (Photographer Unknown),'" located almost in the middle of the collection, is, in many ways, the heart of the book. More thoroughly than any other single poem in the book, it explores the various meanings of seeing, from simple perception (the poem begins with a long, very precise description of the image on the postcard itself), to seeing as regarding, as hallucination, and as vision.

The last line (I won't give it away here) is stunning for its surprise and, at the same time, one realizes immediately, its inevitability...