The Complete Poems
Published on 18. February 2025
584 pages
978-0-8071-8434-9 (ISBN)
Description
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.
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Wendy Barker | Steven G. Kellman
The Complete Poems
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02/2025
Louisiana State University Press
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The Complete Poems
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02/2025
Louisiana State University Press
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Persons
Wendy Barker published fifteen collections of verse. Her poems appeared regularly in Poetry magazine, the Southern Review, and other literary journals. At the time of her death in 2023, she was poet-in-residence and the Pearl LeWinn Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she taught since 1982.
Steven G. Kellman is professor of comparative literature and the Jack and Laura Richmond Endowed Faculty Fellow at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Ilan Stavans is the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities and Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College, the publisher of Restless Books, and a consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary.
Content
- COVER
- CONTENTS
- INTRODUCTION. Wendy Barker: 'Tis Not a Different Time
- WINTER CHICKENS AND OTHER POEMS (1990)
- Foundations
- Wanting Animals
- Three Poems in Dead Winter
- Deer Running
- Saturday Kitchen Requiem
- Kitchen Fever
- Drive to the Pig Farm
- Hot Fall After Cool Summer
- Moving In, Moving Out
- Disappearing Acts
- You, Arthritis Fusing Your Joints
- The Navy Blue Chair
- Listen, Wind
- Hotel Proprietor, the Villa Betty
- Montalbano
- Scanno
- Overnight in Tarvisio
- Washing in Cremona at Ten O'Clock
- Schönbrunn Yellow
- Winter Chickens
- Cub Scouts and Yellow Corn
- Saying Goodbye
- Night Song
- Lost Dog
- Red Chair at the Piano Recital
- Expatriate
- Grandfather
- Needlepoint
- Love Poem
- July
- Canning Season
- Three for Frost
- Coming Through December
- Swallow Watcher
- LET THE ICE SPEAK (1991)
- Baptism
- Playing Witches at Recess
- Playing the Games of Statues
- Dancing Lessons
- My Father's Living Room
- My Parents, in That Light
- The Freezer in the House
- My Mother's Sewing Machine
- Black Sheep, White Stars
- Why We Went to the Ocean
- Snow White's Father's Second Wife's Tale
- From the Attic at Thornfield
- Persephone's Version
- On Climbing Trees, for Louisa May Alcott
- For Want of Dolls
- Snow White at the Convention Finds the Bear
- Heat, Letting Go
- Sounding Dreams
- Hurricane Warnings
- Your 50th, What Cake
- 14th Spring
- Summer Time
- Going Back, Coming Home
- Once More, Squam Lake
- Identifying Things
- Father's Fish
- Trying To
- Requiescat, for My Father
- Giving up the Dead
- from EVE REMEMBERS (1996)
- Eve Remembers
- The Ripening
- Touching Adam
- Eve Asks Adam
- Palm
- You Held
- Your Name
- Moved
- The Divide
- Expulsion
- Spent
- Gone from You
- I Am Left With
- You Have Taken
- Out from Paradise
- WAY OF WHITENESS (2000)
- I. CEREMONIES
- Taking a Language
- Matter of Singing
- Some Days the Only
- Of Mice and Men
- Stylist
- Color Analysis
- The Bottom
- Olympic Trials
- On the Subject of Jackets
- Ceremonies for the Dead
- II. ANNUNCIATIONS
- Generation
- In Venice the Travellers
- Ithaca, on the Landing
- Facing Masks
- The Face That
- The Judgment, Aphrodite Speaks
- Mermaids, the Singing
- Annunciations
- III. WAY OF WHITENESS
- Eclipse
- Liquid Poem
- At 50, Choosing New Make-Up
- Practicality, Foam, and Nighties
- Reason of Lace
- Perennial
- Inheritance
- Picnic Makings
- Eating San Gimignano
- Walking with You
- Way of Whiteness
- from POEMS' PROGRESS (2002)
- Practice
- One Lemon
- Exorcism of a Nightmare
- The Dogs of Sofia
- Strays
- Oatmeal and Morning Silence
- What Ceilings
- POEMS FROM PARADISE (2005)
- I Don't Know
- The Fifth Day
- Lemon, Oak, Cypress
- The Third Week
- Oh, You Said, Your
- Our Small
- At First You Insisted
- At Last
- Butterfly
- We Said
- If I Was the One
- The Divide
- Now You Are
- I Had Wanted to Say
- At the Gate
- Surrounded
- The Snow
- This Fence
- Away
- I Have Become
- Bare
- The Rocks
- Maybe I Listened
- Too Busy
- I Think
- To Reconstruct
- The Snake
- But I Couldn't
- Whether
- The Pool
- You Looked
- You
- I Want
- If I Could Shake
- Once
- Sometimes
- Coloring
- You Standing
- Through
- Gift
- So This
- In This Rain
- Even Rose Petals
- Evening
- Pine
- The Return
- We Are
- If a God
- BETWEEN FRAMES (2006)
- Morning Screening with the Film Critics
- Old Anniversary
- Trash
- Was It When
- The World Is Divided
- At the End of August
- This Is Not
- Banned
- De Nada
- Monday
- Pain: Muttering
- Pain: Second Thoughts
- Pain: Management
- Pain: Inhalation
- Untitled, At the Movies
- Reflection
- After Teaching The Waste Land
- Serial Monogamy, On the Help Line
- At a Performance of Joyce's The Dead
- Flood
- This Garden
- Waking
- Full
- Wedding Crashers
- THINGS OF THE WEATHER (2009)
- Sunspots
- Condensation Nuclei
- Auroras, Borealis and Australis
- Contrails
- Near-Earth Object
- Solar System
- Lunar Eclipse, Alto-Stratus
- Stratus Opacus Nebulosus
- Brockenspectre
- Thunder
- Cumulonimbus Incus
- Halo
- Full Moon, Cirrocumulus, Light Breeze, and Iridescence
- Thermokarst
- Waning Gibbous Moon
- Cumulus and Cirrus
- Altocumulus, Mackerel Sky
- Cumulus Humilis
- Full Moon, Zenith
- Single Cirrus
- Sunset, Cirrus, Cumulus Declining
- Sunset, Crescent, with Venus at Greatest Eastern Elongation
- Waxing Gibbous Moon
- High Sky
- NOTHING BETWEEN US: THE BERKELEY YEARS (2009)
- Teaching Uncle Tom's Children
- Eugene Thompson, the Hall Monitor
- Home Room
- Folks
- Relative
- Rehearsals
- What You Got
- Shop Talk
- Friday Night with the English Teachers
- Sunday Morning, Go for a Drive
- Exercise
- After School
- Stitchery
- World's Finest
- Slow Dancing
- Dessert
- Remedial Reading
- Integration
- On the Bay
- Hair
- Sword
- Freed Up
- Stick Shift
- Eggplant
- Teachers' Lounge
- Slipping In
- Flavor
- Half and Half
- Clay
- Macramé
- "Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man"
- Tennis
- Making a Bed
- Alarm
- Granola
- Advanced Techniques
- Luminous
- Note Cards
- Sweet
- Court
- Sax
- Cross Weave
- Couple
- Chopsticks
- Warm-Up Suits
- Breath
- Audio Visual
- Classical
- 2001
- The Graduate
- Librarian
- Asparagus
- Hot Tub
- Cake
- Synanon
- The Feminine Mystique
- Showering
- Bullshit
- Beetle
- Encounter Group
- Kind of Blue
- Federal Funding
- Great Dane
- Saturday All-Day Extension Class
- Improv at Asilomar
- Porter
- "Monday, Monday"
- Hatched
- Balloons
- Basement
- Cold
- Gimme Five
- Invitation
- Organic
- Answering Machine
- Bloodstone
- Oil Spill
- Last
- Always
- Empty Lot
- Tools
- Desserts
- Miniskirts
- After
- FROM THE MOON, EARTH IS BLUE (2015)
- Order
- Sterenfall
- Black
- The Lost Book
- Assisted Living
- Closeted Indigo
- The Shadow
- Sin Título
- Apologia for Brown
- Composition in Gray
- Transparent
- Raptor
- Apology for Blue
- Catch
- A Crowd, a Host
- Procession
- Light Pink Octagon
- The Irises
- High Yellow
- ONE BLACKBIRD AT A TIME (2015)
- I Hate Telling People I Teach English
- Truth, Beauty, and the Intro Poetry Workshop
- Emily in the Classroom
- His Eyelashes Are Not Tarantulas
- Waking Over Call It Sleep
- I'd Said It Would Be
- In the Seminar, Trying to Launch Passage to India
- About That "One Art"
- Teaching Mrs. Dalloway I'm Thinking
- Alone in the Museum's Greek Collection
- On Teaching Too Many Victorian Novels in Too Short a Space of Time During Which I Become
- Rereading The Golden Bowl
- Wang Wei in the Workshop
- Langston Hughes' "Weary Blues"
- Why I Dread Teaching The Sun Also Rises
- Whenever We've Dipped into Walden
- Preparing Jeffers' "Vulture" Before Class
- Innisfree, They Get
- I'm Not Sure the Cherry Is the "Loveliest of Trees"
- Coming to Cather
- The Morning After Our Second Ecopoetry Class
- Teaching "The Red Wheelbarrow" the 30th Time
- After Spring Break, Arriving at Pound's "In a Station of the Metro"
- Arriving at Wallace Stevens in the 13th Week
- Next-to-Last Week in the Senior Workshop
- Books, Bath Towels, and Beyond
- In Our Class on Roethke
- Ending the Semester in Am Lit
- The Last Time I Taught Robert Frost
- from SHIMMER (2019)
- On the Chinese Scroll
- Or Did I Mistake
- It Could Be Those
- I Hadn't Seen
- §
- Even Tarnished
- The Silver Tongs'
- The Hollow
- The Trivet's
- The Silver Milk Pitcher
- The Sterling Platter
- Mom's Creamer
- The Silver Basket
- Mottled
- The Salt Cellar's
- The Surface
- The Dragon Bowl
- GLOSS (2020)
- What Surfaces
- Along a River
- The RMS Queen Mary
- The Silver Tureen (1)
- Treading the Boards
- "Little Pieces of String Too Small to Be Used"
- This Far Downstream
- Sunday Lunch at Mom's Cousin Dinnie's: June 1969
- Is His Boat Strong
- Silk Roads
- The Silver Tureen (2)
- Below the Salt
- Ivory Carvings
- Accounting for Granny
- Perhaps the Man
- "Elegant," She Said
- Maybe His Boat
- §
- Mining Silver
- Stiff Upper Lip
- Interior
- Silver Handles, Spouts
- Latent Image
- But Even These
- Surgery, a Little History
- How a Surface
- §
- The Silver Tureen (3)
- Now I Learn
- Gathering Bones
- Foldings
- Her Lists
- Incest
- Bird Songs
- §
- Perhaps Upstream
- Beyond a Certain Age, I Look for Paris in Paris
- The Scroll's Landscape
- from WEAVE (2022)
- In the Gallery
- On Salt
- One Week After the Election
- About Chocolate
- The Dirt
- That Bell for Ethel
- After the Shooting in Tucson
- On Stain Removal
- Sour Take
- Why Cages
- On Scissors and Matisse
- In My Seventy-Sixth Year
- In Praise of Stumps
- Rilke to Roethke on Rosh Hashanah
- On Delta Flight #2164 from JFK
- Not Montale's Eel
- In the Galápagos
- After Reading Baudelaire
- In Light of the Eclipse
- Lifted
- Circlings
- THOSE ROADS, THESE MOONS (2023)
- These Roads
- Cockroaches
- Pandemic Road
- Driving While White
- Diagnosis
- Under Roads
- Knots in the Wood
- Sabbath Road
- Another Way to Look at Fall
- Under Frigid Skies
- A Waning Moon Brings
- Merits of COVID
- End of October
- The Pink Moon Heralds
- During June's Birth Moon
- Noting New Music
- UNCOLLECTED POEMS
- Crash
- Alone with Wolf Moon
- The Bones Know
- Bone Ash, Bone China
- The Make-Up of Bones
- And I Thought I Knew Where I Was Going
- Road to a Candidate
- What Blossoms
- On Silver Spoons
- Distances
- In the Endoscopy Center
- Annual Anguish
- The Visitations
- Almost Alone During COVID
- The Fall, 2020
- Hope
- On Election Day
- When the Spring Is Not Renewing
- Ten Months Now, No Friends Visiting
- Foundational
- Struggling to Find Hope
- When Riots Are Hardly a Hoot
- Sizing
- Turning Eighty, Ruminations
- Transition
- After the Worm Moon's Arrival
- How Can I Ever Forget
- You Inside Me
- He May Appear a Small Man
- I Have Never Seen His Hands
- Stuff
- AFTERWORD
- INDEX OF FIRST LINES
- ABOUT THE AUTHOR
