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Barry Spacks:
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Barry Spacks is the Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara, California |
Over the years, prizewinning poet Barry Spacks has published many poems in journals paper or pixel, as well as stories, two novels, and seven poetry collections. This CD draws from his collection Spacks Street: New and Selected Poems, published by Johns Hopkins, integrating those poems with recent new work. A selection of poems from Spacks' latest work, the Cherry Grove Prize winner Regarding Women, is also available here on CD in a reading by the poet. | |
Barry Spacks' poems have always been exceptionally readable because, even when the subjects are poignant or distressing, the words are at play, rejoicing in their adequacy to life. Clear, energetic, prodigal, ebullient, human, these poems are good company. Spacks is that rara avis: a poet you immediately feel you would care to know personally: humane, intelligent, and compassionate, with a wry humor that sometimes operates at his own expense. Spacks reminds us that we have no grim duty to read poetry; it must entertain and illumine us, or it does not exist. Sitting alone with him in the recording studio, focusing only on the presence of his voice in my headset, I had an intimate experience of the gentle humor, the passionate, compassionate sensibility, and the deep and sometimes surprising insights that shine in his poems. . . In the recording, Barry briefly introduces each poem, so even an unsophisticate like me is invited, escorted, into each experience. The overall result is a very intimate "private reading". Anybody who reads poems for pleasure is liable to be thought old-fashioned, and so is anyone who takes the skill and care that Barry Spacks does to make objects of real beauty out of his poems. I think the time for such readers, and for masterly lyrics like Spacks's, may have come round again, as fashions will. There is a recurrent humor, always rooted in affection... transfixing us with strokes of sombre wit. The basic mood is hopeful, lighthearted; poems end in easings of tension, outward motions of release ...[they] partake of the quality of a saving miracle; we see literal event modulate effortlessly into myth. |
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