Defying Extinction By Amy Barone

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By Frank Wilson

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Among John Stuart Mill’s more famous observations is that “eloquence is heard, poetry  is overheard.” This latest collection of Amy Barone’s poems demonstrates this in an extraordinary way: Much that Barone so sharply observes of today’s world she wondrously transmutes into the poetry implicit in the language we speak every day: “Flashes of computer screens take me to task … I walk down familiar streets/in cities I no longer know.”

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Barone lives in New York City, but she grew up in Bryn Mawr, and has not forgotten her home town, remembering for instance “that ‘87 Andy Summers show when I was surrounded/by ‘it’ girls on and off stage at Philly’s Chestnut Cabaret” (“In the Pocket”). But Barone likes to travel, a favorite destination being Abruzzo. In “Bearly” she tells of the Abruzzan brown bears, “calm creatures / who roam the Apennine Mountains and woodlands … near the land of my ancestors / in a grand national park on a tourist ridden/peninsula that’s in hibernation.”

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There is much that is elegiac here. Barone’s grief for her late mother is palpable, nowhere more so than in “Handkerchiefs”:

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I found a paisley handkerchief in my mother’s handbag

on the day of her stroke. I left it there, cherished it,

never to be handled again — a symbol of etiquette,

her ladylike ways, a vanishing age.

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The title poem has to do with a massive ribbon that “will hang along the Brown Building/in Lower Manhattan, where 146 garment workers … perished in a fire/on March 25, 1911 ….”

Barone’s contribution is a “sky-blue fabric from bedding/my late mother sent me as a housewarming gift.”

A couple of poems later, we learn in “Lesson” that “He invites to his villa in Tivoli. / Presses me to love fluidly.” Who might that be? Well, it seems,

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Despite a gap of over 2,000 years,

ages after the rise and fall of Rome,

Catullus gives me writing lessons.

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Notable throughout these poems is Barone’s identification with the natural world.  Clematis, for instance: “Reluctant like a clematis, I shy from conflict … “

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Once I knew how to climb,

kept my reach high on the vine.

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Now I mingle with wild artists,

crush the impulse to wilt over rows.

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It is easy enough in a review to give a pretty clear idea of the variety of these poems. What is not so easy to get across is how this variety contributes to the extraordinary unity of the collection. Indeed, when one finishes reading the book, the sense of ensemble is so strong that one has no choice but to read it again. Then one realizes that those Abruzzan bears are also “defying extinction.”

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Without preaching, Barone makes us aware that the world we live in now is quite different from the one most of us grew up in: “I don’t watch movies from a Smart TV that may be watching me.” Likewise, “Sometimes I draft stories on paper, not a blinding screen. / Soft on the eyes and gentle on my low-tech mind.”

But the collection ends on a kind of light note. Early in the book, we were told “Now that water’s been spotted there,/I think I’ll head to the moon for a swim ….”  And the final poem in the book, “Dolce far Niente” (the dictionary defines it as “pleasant relaxation in carefree idleness”) makes reference to the Covid unpleasantness:

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Most nights, quarantine dreams intoxicate me,

so many people I hadn’t seen in years.

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But the sign-off is light-hearted: “Recharge your smartphone—freedom’s on the line.”

This is a book to treasure.

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You can find the book here: DEFYING EXTINCTION, poetry by Amy Barone — Broadstone Books

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Frank Wilson is a retired book review editor of The Inquirer. Books, Inq. — The Epilogue

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