Reading Wind by Carol Barrett, Reviewed by John Martin

So many of the poems that I read these days––including my own––are looking for their reason to be, trying to figure out what and why they are, hoping to make some meaning through the act of making themselves. The poems in Carol Barrett's new collection, Reading Wind, stand in contrast–– not just accepting of, but steeped in the reality and import of the physical world, reveling in solid images of rain, wind, sky, fire, plants, animals. The collection is an extended elegy and love letter to her father, a country doctor, who was also an avid musician, botanist, birder, observer of all things––a man of many parts, a man who was deeply and happily a part of that physical world she summons in the poems.

To live fully in the natural world is to accept that all lives end. Reading Wind attempts to make sense of that fact while also celebrating all that goes before the end: that thing we call "a life." And it's clear from the poems that her father's life was a full one, spanning urology, surgery, rhododendrons, corn, baritone horns, cellos, gooseberry pies, bonfires, sly humor, and deft insight. The title poem begins, "When yellow light drifts down soft as dove wings folding, / my father would say storm coming. He would read the wind ...." In those two lines and what follows, Barrett proposes that there is more than one kind of reading in this world. We read her lines about a man who reads the wind, the movement of tree leaves, a rise in the creek. Encountering that line was a magical moment for me, allowing me to see that reading a poem is just one version of something we engage in every moment as we try to understand this life we find ourselves in.

The presence of the natural world is so strong in Reading Wind that it makes any attempt to find meaning apart from it feel almost foolish, Quixotic. Trees, rain, rivers, corn, clouds, hands, and birds fill the poems. In “The Tempering,” Barrett writes, Evening, he laments the day's / small losses, robins in his voice.... Even her father's apothecary jars and quaint urinals somehow fit into a sense of the natural world permeating everything. And many of the natural images are imbued with human qualities: he could feel the sky / fuming miles before the hail spun out on the road ("Reading Wind") and ...the elms / are nearly blue with waiting ("The Tempering"). Reading Barrett's poems, it's easy––and delightful––to lose track of just who and what you are.

Since Barrett's father lived and practiced medicine on the rainy western side of the Cascades, it makes sense that water is the dominant motif of Reading Wind. From the rhythm of falling rain to sloppy rivulets of runoff to the mighty Columbia River itself, water is the basic natural image. Early in the book, Barrett's father is humbled by an expedition on the Columbia. Later he collapses and is carried out into a storm.  In “Holding the Rain,” Barrett says, how could he be not OK / in the rain.... And in the final poem, the final stanza, "The river knows what comes, comes again. ("Elegy for My Father's Passing"). It all reminded me once more that we are mostly water and deeply united, maybe more than we're prepared to admit, with the cycles of the natural world.

Ultimately, Barrett's book is less an elegy and more a paean. It conveys less a sense of loss and more a sense of celebration. Whatever human love is, it's likely the key element here. The collection's penultimate poem, "Messengers,” in which the poet cleans out her father's cabin, ends,

When I leave I will pinch a morsel
of frosted donut, crumble it by the dish
drainer, where it will be taken
for an error, where it will convey,
finally, some small gratitude.

I find myself returning, often in the evening before bed, to read one or two poems from Reading Wind, knowing they will take me to a settled spot––a home––in my wandering and wondering. I feel then as if I had picked up and rubbed a small stone from one of the many rivers that run through Reading Wind, something smooth and just weighty enough for my hand, something that knows itself and is at peace with what it knows.