3: A Taos Press, April 2016
Surfaces
The Country so much resembled
the wound of the mind,
a simple and healable event
not unconscious but
to the infliction of injury, particularly striking
in its inadvertent and unwished for—
soon—too soon—
that I was induced to believe
that I was near that place
that I was released
paradoxically—
through—
the image of rain, repeating;
the lake obsidian,
inchoate.
It is this plea by an other
asking to be seen and heard—
this call by which the other
commands us to awaken.
Reviews:
Writing over, on top of, and into history, Will Barnes is a seeker and a tracker, a poet whose tracing gaze is poised to capture nature’s plain speech in all its complexity, collecting indicants, compiling evidence, missing nothing. Shaping “the line, the real, the now,” The Ledgerbook is a palimpsest of beings: human, plant and “animate earth;” a chorus of prints: palm, hoof, leaf and otherwise. Barnes is a listener, witness and scribe to temporal realms; bringing our gaze to “bone chips in the roses,” this lyric telling “unplying at the spine” generously guides us to understand that we “are in the story, too.”
—Annie Guthrie, The Good Dark
The Ledgerbook is made of lavish textures. Line by line, the writing—intensely musical and connotative—takes on almost as much materiality as the gorgeous, violent West it addresses. Language is such a geologic and biologic presence here, it’s as if the story is layered in sheaves, as Barnes puts it. In concept and arc, the book sketches the tenuous, vibrant present into the spaces left by journal entries, love letters, and the brutal historical record. What beautiful, intelligent, ambitious work.
—Greg Glazner, From the Iron Chair, Singularity, and Opening the World
William S. Barnes 