The poems of Moving the Bones are not designed to be consumed on the fly. With its long-lined sagacity, this collection would seem to take its cues from the likes of the Slow Living movement. Its art, brewed over the days of the COVID-19 lockdown, contains a measured thinking, a considered rhythm—like the man himself, if I’m to judge his character by any number of interviews with Barot I’ve listened to or watched over the years. 

“My mind has a slow metabolism,” he writes in the book’s opening poem, “Pleasure.” Barot continues, “but it understands that if you look at something / long enough, it will have something / to say to you.”

The collection’s poems—Barot’s fifth—are concerned with memory, time, love, art. 

“Everything was basically about time,” he states from inside the ninth of thirty numbered prose poems at the core of the book, the totality of which is titled, “During the Pandemic.” This series was originally published as a chapbook put out by Albion Books. 

Much of the book leans toward a self-referential voice aware of its poetic identity. “Who knew what was true now?” the poet muses. “Death tolls. Or those dolphins returning to the empty canals of Venice” (from number 7 of “During the Pandemic.”) And, as the kick-off poem in the group concludes about a black canvas, it “could be open-ended and be a consensus at the same time. Like a plague.” 

The debate over time and kinds of time, however, is prominent, a deep well from which Barot drinks often. One implicit comparison of time begins, “Time and the dragonfly. Time and the diamond” (from number 24 of “During the Pandemic.”) Dragonflies live only days (though they have been part of the planet for millenia), while diamonds form over millions of years. 

The repetition of the opening phrase (“During the pandemic”) is a monotony even while it interrupts what is monotonous. Worried analysis around everyday things, that only a short time ago weren’t worthy of notice, is relieved by starting at the beginning again each time. Still, its faithful sameness represents the experience of those months where very little changed in our lives. Perhaps this dual purpose is related to the paradox in Barot’s line, “I went to the barren track of the high school and felt as a mending, walking around in circles.” (from number 23).

Finally, a quiet urgency reaches us from number 30, the final in the line-up:

And there were days when I remembered the teacher who made us memorize a poem each week, and when we asked why, she said we might one day find ourselves in a wreck at the side of the road and we would recite these poems to stay alive.

Another offspring of 2020, “The Streets,” is an extraordinary composition set during the turbulent protest days of that spring, after the murder of George Floyd. In it, Barot’s narrator is at home while his partner ventures into the rioting world. The fact that the speaker takes the role of someone just outside the chaos—the way in which the overwhelming majority of the world would experience the situation—allows the reader an authentic avenue to sidle up and listen. This placement of the narrator also feeds into Barot’s tendency to create a self-conscious poem—one that acknowledges itself as a construction. A description of a woman knocked to the ground reported to the speaker in “The Streets,” becomes “a seashell or an ampersand” since the speaker has “the luxury of seeing the woman as an image.” 

Towards the close of “The Streets,” he again refers to poetry as such (and includes a small nod to its limitations).

But it wasn’t a war, he said, because he
could walk away from it and take the bus
back home. I thought of him looking like a boy
looking out the window, the tilt of late sun
a hand smoothing a tablecloth. I thought
of the bus the way I thought of poems, that it
was a civic space and a lyric space at once.
I knew not to say any more about what
I was only imagining.

Here he speaks of the beloved as he does in other places in the collection, with a kind of remove and awe. Perhaps it’s the remove that inspires the awe. Regardless, it’s a grand loveliness and a joy to absorb. 

Though the majority of the book could not be said to contain explicit love poems, or at least not what we would traditionally imagine as embodying the tropes of a love poem, reading Barot, I want to ask—what isn’t a love poem? The carefully considered gaze he aims at the world is a tenderness, a kind of love. Turning to more obvious candidates for the love column, however, there is “The Lovers,” a stunning litany of memory within memory. Spun with vivid clarity in this piece are not only the speaker’s remembrances regarding men of the past, but the sedimentary layers of the men’s own stories. (“There is no logic in what we keep.”) 

“The Lovers” is among several poems that incorporate lists like swirling eddies (also in this category: “Abundance,” “Moving the Bones,” and the ekphrastic “Crosshatch 1” and “Crosshatch 2”). These titles are part of a sophisticated breed of list poem that offer the reader the chance to mill about in the mind of the poet, complicating and shifting what he wants to show us. Here’s a passage from “The Mussel:”

One way of being hidden
is to be in plain sight, looking like a black rock
among other rocks in a streambed.
Another way is to be small

and latch on to the fins and gills
of fish and travel up rapids,
up rivers, across lakes, then let go,
away from the home that is every beginning.

Still another way is to live
so long you outlive counting…

It’s not easy to cut off the quotation. You must hear all the ways of being hidden this poet gifts us.

Ekphrasis in Barot’s work has been a constant over the years. The three sections of “The Boy with a Flower Behind His Ear” read without punctuation and travel thirty years into the past, return to present day, and then resurface at a point four hundred years ago, when Caravaggio painted “Boy Bitten by a Lizard.” 

And as he will also do in the late-in-the-book poem “Abundance,” in “My Rembrandt,” Barot circles around ideas of childhood memory and shame. He tells us that at the point we meet Rembrandt in this poem, his fame is in decline. Yet this man, who is shown to be indeed a man underneath the legend, is “outwitting shame” through his grand self-portrait that is the poem’s inspiration and in which the poet finds his own reflection. Barot ponders, unhurriedly, the possibility that what could be taken for ill fortune or a dreaded fate might instead be a treasure, something over which to marvel. In fact, memory itself he names “its own wonder cabinet.”

Similarly, the abundance of “Abundance” arrives in unexpected forms. In the case of this poem, those include counting rice grains, a loved—though invasive—tree, and Kentucky Fried Chicken. Or, if you’ll allow me to relate a favorite metaphor, there is: “…The abundance / of having a new truth in the mind, the bloom / in your senses like biting into a fennel seed.” 

Perhaps by way of one more attempt to explain his constitution, the speaker in “Abundance,” by this point in the collection long-beloved to me for his steady amazement, his encompassing eye, gives us, “All my life I have been / drawn to exercises in patience because so many / of the things I love don’t love me back.”

Though poets Dickinson, Miłosz, and Larkin already populate that poem, allow me the daring to crowd in one more. I couldn’t help hearing a kind of echo in the line above of Louise Glück speaking from one of the many poems in The Wild Iris titled “Matins:” “We merely knew it wasn’t human nature to love / only what returns love.” What Barot (and perhaps Glück) is resisting, it seems to me, is our pitiable tendency to whine, to assume our lot less, to adopt a model of scarcity. Barot rejects our modern competition over who has it worse. Fear is present in places through these pages, and with good reason, as we navigate the disasters of the modern age with a truth-teller such as Barot. But there is no room for despondency or gloom, not when wonder is always available.

Each poem here feels like an education—in poetry and in the human condition. Moving the Bones also turns away from the recent trend of the 100+ page poetry book in favor of a modest length that packs a punch. If I left desiring anything, it was notes at the end of the book to tell me more backstory, though who’s to say I’m not just lazy or entitled—wanting my peek behind the curtain without extra effort. Reading Moving the Bones in a post-2024 election, while knowing it was written pre-election, lends the book the sense of possessing something pre-ordained, a wise chronicle trying to soothe across time—to refer to Barot’s own pivot point.

We are in the midst of an era that demands our attention here, no here, here! That splashes disaster after disaster onto our screens in rapid succession. Moving the Bones attempts to breathe through even the most frenetic of days. Because, surely, as stated in “The Singing,” “there is no resolving the moment until it ends.”

…With kind curiosity, I also want
to go to the woman and ask her what the song is about.
One span of the song sounds like a scorched house,
while another quavers upward, as when
the plane sharply banks, filling the window with the sky.
No one in the room has moved for a long time.
There is no resolving the moment until it ends.
Whether the woman is aware of the rest of us, she does not
give any indication by lowering her voice.
She sings. She sings. She sings. She sings.

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