ros barber

how things are on thursday

PN Review 169, May/June 2006
More Matter, With Less Art

Ros Barber’s How Things Are On Thursday is composed largely of narratives which deal with the intricacies of universal emotions. She puts on a first-class ventriloquist’s act throughout, speaking with equal parts pathos and defiance.

This is not a book to be read over breakfast on a Monday morning; most of the poems have a very bleak tone. Take, for instance, the woman in ‘Liberation’: ‘At least she gets to pass out when she wants./At least she gets to stay in her outside shoes.’ Even the ‘neglected potatoes’ had more life in them as they ‘galloped their way to soup’!

Barber is never more effective than when her intent is to chill. ‘He’d Push My Hands Together’ is typical, telling the story of someone who grows up with a religious fanatic for a father:

At home the comfort of instant retribution:
saying (or not saying) grace formed the holy trinity

of beatings: breakfast, lunch and tea.

But as the years pass:

He called me from his bed and I made him wait, and wait,

almost drunk on the power. When he stopped calling
I went to him ...

The title sequence itself is very powerful in its emotional directness, and all the more so as this is coupled with tightness of expression. In short, there is much of interest in this first collection. It offers formal skill (including a sequence of seven sonnets), vividness of imagery and, most of all, unwavering clarity of voice. Perhaps Barber’s special distinction, however, is that she has succeeded in writing a collection which grants as much to the general reader as it does to the devotee of contemporary poetry.

- Kate Keogan

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