Tina Barr's Green Target Is Hardly Tranquil

At The Rumpus, Sarah Freligh reviews Tina Barr's new book, Green Target (Barrow Street, 2018), whose speaker is "an alien object herself, a big city person who’s relocated to a rural locale that is far from bucolic." More:

It was Wordsworth who first suggested that poetry could be inspired by nature, that a writer could immerse herself in the natural world and, by paying close attention, arrive at a kind of verse that “takes its origins recollected in tranquility.” Barr’s speaker is an impeccable observer of the natural world, but she is hardly tranquil, especially in the first fraught months of rural life. “One worries in the mountains,” she says. Barr’s landscapes are violent with life, redolent with nature’s teem and seethe: the goldenrod “seeds our heads with bites from some / insect” while brambles’ thorns “scrape / bar pins of blood on my forearms.” Snakes lurk everywhere—in the grass near walking paths or twined inside of the compost bin: Garter snakes, black and harmless, and copperheads, beautiful and lethal, even in death when its “jaws kept / opening like a Venus Flytrap’s mouth.” Nature here is its own speeding automobile—it’s best to always look both ways and be mindful of where one treads.

What is familiar to the locals becomes exotic, even grotesque, from the vantage point of the speaker. The poem “Agricultural Fair,” located in that familiar institution of rural places, describes a circular track on which four piglets race “towards a pile of neon Cheetos.” In another barn, infant calves lay “collapsed” in the hay: “we hoped their mother knew not to step / near their flicked-back ears, their sloe-eyed wonder,” an image that summons a poignant memory of the speaker’s own mother who, at life’s end, “lay content, as if in hay.” Like the calves, the mother is helpless, an infant dependent on her daughters for her care... 

Read on at The Rumpus.