Sunday, November 27, 2022

Speaking of Sebastian Barry....

As detailed elsewhere, * I ran into Sebastian Barry by accident, but I admired his play Prayers of Sherkin enough to want MORE. My first MORE was one of his (to date) three poetry collections, 

1985
, Mountrath, Portlaoise, Ireland: Dolmen Press
, 67 p.

And I'm sorry to say that the poems I read there puzzled me. Sometimes baffled me. And often frustrated me. So even though it is a pretty slim book (51 text pages, a number of them only partially full), it took me over a week (and dozens of renewals from the Internet Archive, which only lets you check out books for an hour at a time--the literary equivalent of a whore hotel) to read. 

There were some lines which I found interesting or provocative or revelatory... 

"Our father in heaven, who stopped being my,
I have...done everything I could to unmoor myself...."

And every once in awhile a line (or some lines) would emerge clear and hard from the murk of seemingly (?) willful obfuscation:


"...we must readdress
in case all our letters are sent back
for insufficient postage and insolence."


And I'd be tempted to think, "Ah, he IS good; maybe I just haven't been concentrating hard enough...." And then it'd be back into the murk, and I'd lose my sense of hope for these poems again.

So I did what any self-respecting intellectual would do:


And I read a bit of it, but OoH is not the kind of book you sprint through, so I grabbed a couple of quick insights and then went back to The Rhetorical Town

And I pushed myself through the last pages, but it was still back and forth, a lot of stupid shit occasionally interrupted by a couple of good lines:


And when I finished it, I thought about the title of the book. What the hell is a rhetorical town? Is it a town which favors rhetoric? Is it a town which exists in order to create a dramatic effect or to make a point rather than to get an answer? I thought about it for a few minutes... then decided it was a bullshit title either way.

Maybe I'm being too hard on my boy Sebastian, but based on what I've read so far (admittedly very little), I'd have to say that I found his prose far superior to his poetry. I'm going to try to give The Rhetorical Town another go, just to see what I can see, but to be honest, I'm not really enthusiastic about it. Most of the time I feel like Sebastian Barry is just trying to impress us with cheap magic tricks...all of which are trite and disappointing.

If you'd like to have a go at the book, you can check it out at Internet Archive for free, or you can purchase it for a mere $27.70 from Amazon, $26.81 from AbeBooks, $74.49 + $26.60 Shipping from Biblio (that's a signed copy, though)...well, you get the idea. It's pretty expensive for a 51 page book.

 



* Actually, just below this entry.


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