Next In Line

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Starting with ways of remembering the dead, Next in Line goes on to explore ways of living. Sometimes the poems describe everyday experiences: at the post office or theatre, at a clothing sale, or watching a tree being pollarded. Sometimes we’re taken to places: Istanbul, Paris, Cape Cod. Often we meet people or animals, and in the background the larger world looms: the statue of a young boy stands at a place where young boys were once transported to places they did not want to go, people use buses when the underground is bombed, girls drink wine looted during a riot.

Annette Barnes’ subject in these lapidary poems is the ruthless passage of time. ‘Why does hair / grow from his ears, why aren’t his trousers clean, ’ asks the poem, as though from within the mind that time has begun to erode. ‘Exactly. A world where beauty no longer counts.’ Except that, figure by figure and line by line, these poems make an impassioned case on behalf of beauty: the beauty of form, the beauty of concision, the beauty of unblinking apprehension. Barnes has no patience, indeed she has no time, for easy consolation or euphemizing focus. Which means the consolation here is real. –Linda Gregerson