Praise for Calling in the Bones
Carol Barrett’s poems seamlessly combine grace and rigor. The result for the reader is delight, and the linguistic/emotional provocations unique to poetry. Barrett gives us the stringencies of accurate naming, but does so in such a way that the mystery of the physical world is admitted, and retained. Without a trace of sentimentality, her poems translate this mystery into human terms: “something about the actual sound of the fog/ laying its slow film on the handrail” (“Fog Horn”). Calling in the Bones is a generous book, containing an abundant variety of tone, wit, form, and strong feeling. Its publication is cause for unmitigated celebration.
– Jeffrey Skinner
Carol Barrett’s poems in Calling in the Bones tell engaging stories about people of the past and the present, stories of events occurring in circumstances she understands well and portrays with skill. Barrett subtly reveals insights rising from the connections established, and sometimes broken, with ancestors and families, among neighbors and acquaintances, and with the land. Her selected subjects are portrayed with compassion, honesty and good humor, with detail, originality and the talents of a fine writer. These stories and their worlds live in her poetry.
– Pattiann Rogers
Carol Barrett’s narratives document the suffering and fecundity of an ensemble cast: a mapmaker, a sleep technician, a man who would eat soap are only a few of the actors celebrated by this poet for their small acts of bravery in an all-too-human world.
– Sandra Alcosser
About the Author
Carol Barrett‘s Calling in the Bones is the 2002 winner of the Richard Snyder Memorial Publication Prize. Her chapbook, Drawing Lessons, appeared in 2002 from Finishing Line Press. Recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Barrett is both a Core Professor and administrator with the Union Institute & University.
