ros barber

how things are on thursday

The North issue 36, Spring 2005
- review by Carole Bromley

Ros Barber’s first collection is an enjoyable and satisfying read, impressive in range of subject matter and diversity of form. It opens with autobiographical pieces. She turns the lens on childhood and the disintegration of a marriage in ‘Lafayette Super Eight’ and captures some fine images. The narrator and her siblings ‘look like/the Kennedy children on the funeral newsreel’, their father catching ‘the single/ enduring close-up: three matching offspring/in cable-knits’ on a cine film where there ‘was always some of her, and none of him.’

Other poems deal with difficult relationships – the unspoken wife’s name in ‘Pronoun’ writes itself in the mistress’s skin like ‘a soft, emergent tattoo’, while in ‘Well’ and ‘Soup’ with their fishy imagery, marriage is seen as endured or doomed: ‘Circling above: / vagrants and migrants, the murderous cries of gulls.’

The sonnet sequence ‘Embassy Court’ shows Barber’s technical skill and imaginative range. The building is both home to and compared with prostitutes, down-and-outs, refugees. In ‘What Happens to Women’, for instance, the once grand but now delapidated building is a metaphor for ‘the sudden shift from beauty to disgrace’ which Barber sees as the lot of women ‘no matter who you are’. In ‘Goddess’ she envisages the building restored so that ‘you’ll be lucky if she lets you in.’

The closing sequence, ‘How Things Are On Thursday’ brings together both the sinister tone of some of the earlier poems and a return to the personal. The sequence is about a child’s experience of a mother’s cancer and it is written in the direct, honest voice which characterises Barber’s work. Other voices within the poems – girls at school, the euphemisms and cliches of the medical profession- are perfectly caught.

This is confident writing; Barber’s black humour, her edginess and, above all, her honesty and directness make for an assured first collection.

- Carole Bromley

ros@rosbarber.info
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