Best Barbarian

The invocation “Rage: Sing, Goddess,” opens the second poem in Roger Reeves’s substantial and prodigiously intertextual new collection, Best Barbarian, in which poems speak and sing in a broad range of tones and forms, infused with duende, sometimes moving between anguish and ecstasy in a single page. Though the poems invoke writers and musicians from Dante to Mahalia Jackson to Drake, and from James Baldwin to Virgil (by way of David Ferry), the names, quotes, and allusions do not function as an overlay, but as fundamental elements of the warp and weft of the net of Reeves’s verse, and his own art is both adroit and capacious enough to probe or connect, to complicate or amplify all he catches there. 

Several key themes mingle together in the book. In several poems, the speaker straddles generations as he contemplates the loss of his father, and his own impending fatherhood (“Lord, am I ready?”), grappling with grief and apprehension: 

  I never wanted to be this far 
Into the business of heaven
    Chasing my father hunting
His soul in the corn and confusion of this harvest

Reeves addresses the interlocking violences of white supremacy, police brutality, and colonialism, focused largely on the United States, from its origins in slavery through the continuing plague of state-sponsored killings of Black Americans. A temporal thickness pervades the work, bringing together figures real and fictional, from across history, as in, for example, the persona poem “Grendel’s Mother,” where the titular narrator doubles as an apparition of George Floyd’s mother:

So furious. So furious, I was, 
When my son called to me, called me out of heaven
To come to the crag and corner store
Where it was that he was dying, Mama
I can’t breathe […]

The book’s dedication is “For Naima, for encouraging me to risk beauty,” and amid the brutalities of abuse, death, and decay, these poems both apprehend and enact a sometimes terrifying beauty, as in the complex love poem, “Leaf-Sign and Bray,” (its title a Toni Morrison phrase), which asks:

How else shall I carry the abyss
Between us other than as fire,
As the mistake the sycamore makes
Entering the burning-down door of the saw?