Wendy Barker: The Complete Poems
Wendy Barker: The Complete Poems. Edited by Steven G. Kellman. Foreword by Ilan Stavans. Afterword by Steven G. Kellman. LSU Press: 2025. 584 Pages. $49.95 paperback. $19. 95 Ebook.
Reviewed by Bonnie Lyons
When Wendy Barker died two years ago on March 11, 2023, I, Iike so many people who loved her, was devastated. Two years later, I miss her intensely. We were colleagues in the English department of UTSA and friends from the moment she joined the faculty in 1982. I read Marge Piercy’s wedding poem, “Chuppah” at her wedding to Steve Kellman, and gave them a $1.00 bag of immaculate white rags as a playful wedding gift. We all know that nothing makes up for the loss of a beloved human being. My arms want to hug her. That’s the hard truth.
This sumptuous book of her poems, however, softens the blow. The book like the woman is simply quite wonderful. This volume of more than 500 poems is another kind of “Wendy.” When we talk about loving Shakespeare we don’t mean the biological man; we mean we love the man embodied in his work. the way his poems and plays give us a profound sense of a man we know little about. To have an esteemed publisher like LSU Press happy to publish a poet’s complete body of poems is obviously the mark of national recognition. This huge volume gives each reader the opportunity to trace Wendy Barker’s development from her earliest book, Winter Chickens published in 1990 to her most recent work, Those Roads, These Moonspublished posthumously in 2023 as well as more than 25 uncollected poems. The volume makes er continuous creative power perfectly clear. She was 48 years old when she published her first book and she never stopped writing until her death. From the earliest book she wrote with the wisdom of a mature woman. Her poems reveal Wendy Barker, an extraordinary, deeply perceptive consciousness, a woman who lived deeply and experienced life as a poet, teacher, wife, mother, friend, and engaged citizen. While most often acclaimed as a loving poet of the natural world, she also explores important cultural and political changes in this country, particularly the counter culture, rise of Black consciousness, and feminism.
There is no way to talk about a typical Wendy Barker poem. Unlike Emily Dickinson who used quatrains of alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, Wendy was formally experimental. She wrote long poems, short poems, haiku-like poems ,and prose poems. Here’s a dazzling six -line poem from Things of the Weather:
Altocumulus, Mackerel Sky
Freckled, a dappled thing,
it hasn’t yet decided whether
white or blue, fair or foul, coming
or going, riffles, puff balls, dandelion
shreds, a breath, another
river, the current, brimming, gone over.
Wendy adored the natural world—clouds, birds, trees. She even sometimes taught a class on eco -poetry. But for me some of her most memorable poems are narrative, telling the story of s period of history and her personal life. I learned from Ilan Stavans’ introduction that in her twenties and early thirties Wendy collected bits of writing intending to build them into short stories. Only later did she see that these “bits” were germs of poems, not stories.
Nothing Between Us: The Berkeley Years is a series of short–sometimes one paragraph– prose poems each having an individual title, like ” Eggplant,” ”Stick Shift,” ”Bullshit.” This book is a portrait of herself, a young white blond woman, banker’s daughter, trying to teach poor black kids, to reach them, to connect with them . It is a book about massive cultural changes in The Sixties; it is also an autobiographical portrait of her passionate , liberating love affair with a colleague, a black high school coach. The title of the book of poems—Nothing Between Us suggests how amazingly close she felt to her lover, separated only by air—and also the opposite. She longed for marriage and a lifelong connection, but interracial couples were rare in those days—even illegal in some benighted states. The racial divide was a wall they could not surmount. So at the end nothing lasting is between them. The desperately painful break -up is brilliantly anticipated in an early prose poem, ”Folks.” Initially helpful and supportive, a student later in the year becomes a black Muslim and ”stopped smiling , his eyes gone elsewhere. He still turned in his work on time, still made B’s. But there was nothing between us, never had been.”
A crucial strength of Wendy Barker’s poetry is her ability to shape powerful feelings– especially love and pain—with poetic craft and formal knowledge. The fact that she called Elizabeth Bishop’s villanelle “One Art “ a perfect poem tells us how much she recognized and admired technical skill. Robert Frost insisted free verse was like playing tennis without a net. The villanelle form with its complex requirements –19 lines of three tercets and one quatrain plus two repeating rhymes and two refrains—is to write poetry with a dauntingiy high net. Wendy Barker’s semingly casual poems are the product of a commitment to revision. Toni Morrison says that in art the sweat must not show and it doesn’t in Wendy’s work
Stavans’ introduction and Kellman’s afterword are obviously works of love. When you read Wendy’s poems you will see why.Wendy Barker: The Complete Poems. Edited by Steven G. Kellman. Foreword by Ilan Stavans. Afterword by Steven G. Kellman. LSU Press: 2025. 584 Pages. $49.95 paperback. $19. 95 Ebook.
Reviewed by Bonnie Lyons
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