Review by Cameron Conaway

HOME
by Hathaway Barry

Wordrunner Press
P.O. Box 613
Petaluma, CA 94953-0613
ISBN: 978-1-931002-68-4
2007, 82 pp.
www.wordrunner.com

When it comes to reading, many people adhere to at least one of Louise Rosenblatt’s key components of reader-response: Transaction. Viewing our environment in a new way. Readers are often just as creative and imaginative in reenacting what is read as the author was during the process of writing. It is different for everybody, of course. A reader may come to a work like Home with the intent to be fully immersed. Some readers know the place where they are most easily about to be absorbed in a book. Outside. In a white plastic patio chair. Under an orange tree with the Tucson sun shining through. This usually works for me. Yet during my reading of Home I never left the page. I viewed the poems as unfinished and for the most part overwritten. There is a splash of short poems, but even they seem to leave me asking ‘why?’

Here is the short poem “Sparkles:”

Outside the window
the ocean is sparkling, for no reason
I’m calling you, for no reason
to tell you this (5)

Here is the short poem “Trust:”

Plopped atop a dry rock
a seal waits for the next tide
to fetch him out to sea again. (30)

There is a poem called “Buying Groceries After the Youngest Has Left Home” that is literally a grocery list. There is a poem on page ten called “What the Mountains Say” that is literally what a wilderness survival book says: “How to start a fire. / How to apply a tourniquet,” and the list continues. I understand poetry for the sake of being different has often resulted in major trends, or new ways of looking at the world. But it just isn’t happening here.

There is a poem on page 42 called “This Time,” which features the line “He moved like a man/ who knew rivers,” which I thought was brilliant. But in a book of eighty-some pages of published poetry, there should be plenty more lines to make a reader have that “wow” moment and they should be imbedded within a poem that as a whole provides that “wow” moment. Not to sound like an American Idol judge when they say things like, “that performance could have been done at a local topless bar,” but much of this book feels like diary excerpts or personal poetry that wasn’t meant for an audience to read or for publication.

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Cameron Conaway is the Poet-in-Residence at the University of Arizona.