Wendy Barker

Spanning more than three decades of a life well-lived, Wendy Barker's collected poems convey her encounters with the natural world, her reactions to contemporary social problems, and her experiences in high school and college classrooms. Adored by her students, many of whom became published poets themselves, Barker crafted verse that often recreated her presence in the classroom and her engagement with questions of identity, ethics, and the value of literature. Organized chronologically, this volume enables readers to marvel at the growth of a singular sensibility attentive to the wonders of love and the anguish of mortality. Edited by her husband, Steven G. Kellman, and featuring an introduction by acclaimed scholar and translator Ilan Stavans, Wendy Barker's Complete Poems presents the life's work of a steadily productive, brilliant poet and beloved teacher.

In a haunting and, ultimately, stunning, sequence of poems in varied lyrical forms, Wendy Barker's Gloss develops a narrative that poses questions about her mother's unusual, seemingly privileged, British background. The poems of this gripping book are punctuated by short syllabic meditations on a Chinese scroll picturing a lone man paddling up a long river toward mountains. These little poems serve as tension-building breaks between lineated, conversational poems and prose poems that describe shiny yet tarnished pieces of family silver and snippets of family memories. Throughout, these poems "gloss" the underlying meanings of stories passed down through generations, as the book slowly builds to reveal disturbing facts that had long been hidden. Ultimately, though the book may, at first glance, seem to be validating the British mother's colonial background, with a family history involving a lucrative import-export firm, Barker makes it clear that the damages done by colonialism can cause painful familial as well as global damage.

Wendy Barker's new collection, Shimmer, sparkles with arabesques of image, deft swerves into insight. The two discrete series that make up this volume together comprise a meditation on mortality by focusing on the phenomenology of mourning, the "radiant" surface of things: a Chinese scroll the speaker deciphers; the heirloom (sometimes plated) silver she has inherited.These poems "gleam in the light" of Barker's lyric precision, and radiate powerfully with the "primal force" of an ancient female wisdom "within the earth," which Barker channels. Shimmer bewitches. Cynthia Hogue, author of In June the Labyrinth