Walter Bargen’s latest (his 16th) collection of poems is not pretty, hopeful or uplifting. The forty poems bespeak trouble. The voice is that of a neighbor, or a member of a community chorus overhearing of tragedy, or a fellow human wondering aloud in keen, truthful verse regarding the breakdown of various individuals. In the process, the honesty of the collection calls in to question the very efficacy of society arrayed for the common good. As all good poets, Bargen helps readers see the humanity within the tragedy, the persons involved, rather than sensationalizing the problem. To be sure, there is humor (dark sometimes), there is self-effacement. There is grace implied, but frail humanity speaks most consistently in this volume. Clearly, the first Poet Laureate of Missouri has turned his attention to menacing, vulnerable, perplexing events and attitudes within an array of characters around us whose futility becomes pronounced in Bargen’s lines. Perhaps the old idiom “People who live in glass houses should not throw stones” comes to mind. Thankfully, the poet’s careful observations of troubled others is not simply voyeuristic; it portends a shared path anyone might one day walk. Clearly, the phrasing “trouble behind glass” is itself tragic, for the image suggests the way out is fraught with danger (breaking the glass), thus making the entrapment all the more sinister. Bargen’s book posits a looming question: How will we, the readers, the community, the other onlookers respond? Will we merely gawk, or will we demonstrate empathy, compassion, understanding?
The lyrical quality that Bargen commands enhances his topics. In “Halls of Waters” his subject “turns to ask if this is / the way, and recalls the ocean broken / inside him. / He leaves the stranger / whose boat is already carelessly / rocking out into the clouds” (p. 31, lines 29 -33). “Tolstoy’s Ants” “punctuate / War and Peace across cold linoleum floor” (71, lines 19-20). “In These Times” depicts “a wounded soldier / folded into grief, a soul / waiting to be rescued, waiting / for one arm, then the other / to be slipped into a sleeve, / then to button the body closed” (72-73, lines 27-32). In Bargen’s hands, “Foreign Policy” is farcical like a Laurel and Hardy episode, yet the consequences are real. After inflicting chaos and pointless destruction, “Laurel and Hardy drive off / in a steel skeleton, happy / to have escaped, believing / their cause just” (86-87, lines 48-51). In “Point of No Returns” a pilot “continues, fuel / too low to turn back and too low to arrive” (51-52, lines29-30).
It is too simplistic to dismiss Walter Bargen as cynical or hopeless, but his lines are stark and suggestive. The poet is concerned with the erosion of natural rhythms as he is with the disintegration of purposeful living. Community is rotting, and the poet warns of deterioration. In this book worried people pray “like there’s not tomorrow,” and that is “the point and half the joke” (“Give or Take a Day or Two,” 93, lines 11 -12). The truth is that decline is part of life, and Bargen reminds of the unpleasant yet prevalent facts we tend to ignore. Indeed, lines from The Whole Facts sum up the poet’s varied observations: “A black cat leaps and swats one / bird out of the air. The flock flutters on, / a smaller whole, a winged army, / and for a moment, I grow calm / and remember what it means to grow whole / and smaller with each breath” (35-36, lines 53-58).
reviewed by Ken Hada, East Central University, Ada, Oklahoma
Walter Bargen. Trouble behind glass doors. BkMk Press, University of Missouri – Kansas City, 2013. ISBN 978-188615787-3.