Season of Loss

Bone Yard, the first section of this collection of poems by Jim Barnes, speaks heavily of the past - fictional and historical. A bone yard is a place where bleached relics speak to those who have an attuned ear. The richness of place - landscape, weather, individuals - together with the speaker's own particular use of language grabs hold of our memory, of our sense of loss, and we are there. Dog Days, the second section, through its title, suggests a stagnation, heavy days when there is little movement of body and soul. Many of the poems bear this out. But the stagnation is not total, only periodic. The extreme joy that ends "Dirge," for example, speaks far beyond the despair that is felt by the persona through most of the poem. Memory of the past, knowledge of what has been, affirmation of the loss - these stand as tangibles with which the persona would shore himself against the threatening waves of extinction. Significantly, he says in "Heartland," with a slight nod to Robert Frost, "there is something that will not let / a space be given solely to grass. / The aura holds . . .