John B. Sansone Review of Opus Crush by Lawrence Barrett, Create Space: Charleston SC, 2012; Available at Amazon.com.

Scribbled in my opening notes is that Lawrence Barrett’s poetry describes scenes with imagery that have not been tried before. Secondly, while admitting, and at times lamenting, his need to write, he also knows that his words are but instruments doomed to failure; unable to capture the ineffable; unable to convey full measure. Take the line from “7” of his title poem“Opus Crush:”

“…I realize

that before I reach
paradise comes
purgatory; that
this is the burden
we live
writing songs.”

 

Truly, writing poetry is more than suffering for Barrett, it is purgatorial duty and dark irony as he celebrates his 50^th and states in the same poem:”

 

“…no more hands

to hold in the
broken bird cages
of broken hearts; only
lovers gone running
from this slaughter
house of cold poems…”

Barrett’s Opus is truly a work of crushing poems; poetry crushing dreams; crushing love; crushing hope; crushing disillusionment; crushing the sound of the average and the usual with a rushing waterfall of words. Barrett, a former soldier who served in Iraq speaks of “the slaughter of the innocent:”

 “across the blood-

soaked street of
purple intestines she
runs pissing herself;
skin burning the sul-
fer stench of car-bomb…”

 and of the “nightmare conspiracy incinerating the dream song in each one of us.” Searching for answers he plays devil’s advocate questioning whether it is in “…divine cruelty, sweet pain” that “Yahweh speaks in wrath-fire and commands the smiting of heathens.” Barrett questions himself: “Why have I walked the streets of Baghdad?” He wants to know: “is this the work I leave behind me?”

 Barrett also seeks the mountains where there are:

“no war fortunes,

no political deities,
no poetic institutions,
only native dominion,
herdsmen, foothills,
piles of dust.”

 Barrett finds the mountains not only a place where “the ascetic pines are dying out,” but more importantly a place for sacred contemplation; a place for ascent: “The mountain is a living prayer I cannot yet speak. I do not have the authority.” In a world at war Barrett speaks for a disabled generation and shows us that ascent is still possible; perhaps even necessary.