A Review of Vanishing Acts by Brian Barker
- A Review of Vanishing Acts by Brian Barker
Vanishing Acts by Brian Barker is a 21st century collection of poems that applies surrealist theories and methodologies to the inexplicable absurdities of a world on the brink of mass extinctions and the apocalyptic effects of climate change. Surrealism is often characterized as an aesthetic mood full of melting clocks and apples where faces should be. Lost in the pop synopses are the theoretical underpinnings and political commitments outlined by André Breton with messianic fervor in the Surrealist manifestoes. Reading Barker's poems through a seriously surreal lens brings a greater sense of the political purpose underlying poems that also read like pleasantly dreamy fairy tales.
A key philosophical stance outlined in the Surrealist manifestoes is that reality is entirely interconnected on the sub-atomic and transcendently ethereal planes. An apt metaphor is a delight to readers because it brings us into momentary awareness of this interconnectedness. A raven is a writing desk because the raven, the writing desk, the hand holding the pen, and the child across the room playing in a corner are all knots in a web of being that connects us all. In the Surrealist Manifesto of 1924 Breton quotes Pierre Reverdy on this subject:
The image is a pure creation of the mind.
It cannot be born from a comparison but from ajuxtaposition of two more or less distant realities.
The more the relationship between the twojuxtaposed realities is distant and true, the strongerthe image will be—the greater its emotional power and poetic reality.
A similar appreciation for the deep meaning and transcendent beauty in a hodge podge of associations permeates Barker's work.
In "Lobsters," for instance, he imagines lobsters that have eaten the sea and come, large and full, to land. "They will flash one claw for seizing Skee-Balls, beauty queens, crowbars, and French cigarettes." The poem juxtaposes images from different semantic categories that suddenly feel united by their shared quality of squeezability. As the poem unfolds the lobsters become increasingly terrestrial. We hear them "on the roof and in the attic, clacking away like an escadrille of vulturous typewriters." And now we see the creatures of the air and creatures sea tied to our industrious machines through qualities of clacking and death. By the end of the poem, the reader is creeping up on lobsters reading by lamplight in cozy armchairs, flexing "their speckled mandibles in a frantic gesture of loneliness and menace." Barker offers readers a powerful comfort in discovering the paradox that loneliness and fear are other shared qualities, ties that bind us to this whole interconnected universe.
The surrealist manifestos outline a variety of methodologies for allowing the mind to access a world beyond reason—palm reading, lucid dreaming, hypnosis, reckless absinth-drinking, all were intended to help a writer see through the over-confident and underwhelming insights of mere reason. Through various dream states, Breton insists,
the human explorer will be able to carry his investigation much further, authorized as he will henceforth be not to confine himself solely to the most summary realities. The imagination is perhaps on the point of reasserting itself, of reclaiming its rights. [End Page 226]
While Barker's book does not discuss the methodologies of its making, these prose poems with fairy tale qualities so reminiscent of legendary surrealist writers like Robert Desnos or Cesar Vallejo, the influence of dream states and associative logic is readily apparent. The poem "Blizzard" leaps from visual rhyme to emotional echo, creating an unlikely story along the way. "Because he forgot his muffs, the snow blew sideways into the man's ear, showering down the long spiraling staircase into the Venetian ballroom tucked behind the cerebellum," Barker begins. Readers pass through a ballroom where candelabra hiss like angry octopuses before reaching a scullery where "a snowball fight erupted between maids and footmen." One could read the poem as an allegory about class consciousness, but the couple in alcoves "suckl[ing] a bloody lip" and "kiss[ing] an apple-shaped bruise throbbing just above one breast" seems to point...
