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A dream about horses
Judith Barrington’s new collection challenges human exploitation
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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
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