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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (July 2, 2004)
36 BOOKS ▼ A dream about horses Judith Barrington’s new collection challenges human exploitation TAI too open 2 4 hours D ED VII BEO MAGI LUNES THITS NOVI 1TIES LOTI IONS ANON IONE... S3 W ITH V0YEUI » GLASS DISCON IT1NUED VHS SALE UP TO 8 0%OFF! AS LOW) AS $4.95! PORTLAND 237 SE. MLK BLVD 503-239-1678 2330 S E. 82ND AVE 503-777-6033 ' NEW LOCATION ' VANCOUVER 4811 N E 94TH AVE 360-254-1126 I n the title poem of Judith Barringtons long-awaited third collection of poetry, 1 Horses and the Human Soul (Story Line « Press, $14 softcover), a thoroughbred mare dozes in a midnight field, an unsuspecting tar get of impending violence. Earlier in the book, a young girl presents her ‘‘upturned, hopeful face” to her mother, from whom she must naturally separate as she matures. In another poem, a lesbian comes to terms with her place in the natural order of things, at first feeling alienated and then realizing: “The trouble is not nature, she thinks/but the people who say I’m not part of it.” Barrington’s stunning new collection takes on the elemental themes of the natural world vs. the human, life passages and losses of innocence, violence and inhumanity, sur vival and return to nature. Anchoring her exploration of these themes is the horse and its spirit. The Portlander, who will celebrate her 60th birthday this month, was bom and raised in England and essentially grew up on horse back. She palled around with other girls who were, like her, she says, “in love with horses.” They reveled in caring for their animals and tack, riding and competing, and all things equine-related. Barrington*says riding horses was her “cho sen world.” Growing up in the 1950s, it was a world that allowed girls her age to avoid being boxed into demure, feminine roles. Instead, she and her friends were active and indepen dent. The experience was, she explains, “very formative. It had a major influence on who I turned out to be.” Horses also had an important influence on her imagination. One poem pays homage to psychologist Carl Jung, who said that if you dream about horses you are dreaming about your own spirit. Another, the elegiac “Living Without Horses,” muses: To live without horses is to carry them with you always: the one who lifted you over the tiger trap, the one who kicked you when you deserved it, and the dappled grey one who lay down under you and died as you ran away unable to stay with him on that path beside the golf course, breathing in what you would search and search for in the years to come. Many of Barrington’s latest poems are infused with this kind of longing and re membrance, as if they are river rocks the poet turned over and over in her hand for years, to remember the essences of water and stone. So, too, are the poems lovingly ren dered; they are acute, lyrical, sprinkled with humor, deeply compassionate, meant to be read again and again. arrington says the process of writing a poem is not about executing an intended message. Rather, “something is pulled out of you that you didn’t know you knew.” In her prologue, "The Poem,” Barrington writes that “the poem...has lodged in my heart like a stone in the shoe.” She beauti fully, playfully captures the undeniable, mysterious and sometimes tormenting urge to create. “The Poem” serves as a Rosetta B M eg D aly stone for the col lection, the answer to the why of grappling with painful or difficult material: “There is no avoiding it...no stillness that can ease the bruise/except the stillness of a motionless heart.” Arranged in two parts, Horses and the Human Soul travels an arc from a childhood spent in nature and with horses to adult wranglings with oppression and materialism and then back to the natural world with the wizened eyes of experience. The author writes bravely and with nuance about human injustices, particu larly homophobia, sexism and war. Her incorporation of human vio lence toward ani mals marks a new Judith Barrington sees poetry as something point in her own ‘‘pulled out of you that you didn’t know political evolu you knew” tion. “As I get older, I care more about the treat Barrington ment of animals,” she says. “Exploitation is is also the exploitation...it’s all connected because it’s an author of attitude of superiority, whether it’s men over a memoir, women.. .or human over all the other species.” Lifesaving— Barrington’s work, while often politically about the incisive and unflinching, also includes humor death of her and delight. There is a slyly unmistakable parents in a English wit, as well as an all-out poking fun. cruise ship fire “Why Young Girls Like to Ride Bareback,” for and coming of instance, expertly and delicately turns a crass age as a les joke into a warm, empowering embrace of pre- bian—which won the 2000 Lambda Literary teen female (and queer) sexuality: Award for Lesbian Autobiography and was a Now you hold her, warm and alive, between finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award your thighs. and an Oregon Book Award. In summer, wearing shorts, you feel the dander Barrington is now at work on a book of her coat, glossy and dusty at the same time, length poem, written in the terza rima form greasing up the insides of your calves, (think Dante’s “Inferno”), about her rela and as she walks, each of your knees in turn tionship to World War II. She was bom dur feels the muscle bulge out behind her shoulder. ing an air raid, which she writes about in one of the poems in Horses, and her partner, arrington’s core readership in the United Ruth Gundle, lost many family members in States has been in lesbian and feminist the Holocaust. circles. While she is glad to have readers Barrington will also likely spend time this who appreciate her content, she is also summer at Soapstone Creek on the Oregon pleased to be highly regarded for her poetry coast, where she and Giindie run the Soap itself, which is especially true in her native stone Writing Retreat for Women. One country. Her poem “The Dyke with No imagines Soapstone is not unlike “the swift, Name Thinks About Landscape" won the sleepless river” in Barrington’s poem “Kinds 1996 Dulwich Festival Poetry Contest, judged of Sleep”: “[A] river which dreams/and by famed Iranian-British poet and stage dreams for the women who hold each actress Mimi Khalvati. other/on its bank, not yet dreaming for “There’s something about the syntax and themselves.” JH rhythms of the language that have remained English,” says Barrington, who has lived in the Features Editor M eg D aly can be reached at States for 30 years. megdaly@justout. com. B PHOTO BY ADULI VIDEO by
