Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced
Alice James Books, 2004
The family response to the sudden deaths of the speaker's two young nieces is at the center of Catherine Barnett's award-winning first collection. This series of elegies records the transit of grief, observing with an unflinching eye how a singular traumatic event can permanently alter our understanding of time, danger, the material world and family. Marked by clarity and restraint, these lyric poems narrate a wrenching story that explores the depths and limits of empathy.
PRAISE
“Catherine Barnett has written here a very extraordinary ‘first book’: a tactful, restrained, passionate study of grief, almost a novel in its telling/singing of one heartbreaking story. It's classical, egoless voice will be company to many in these (any) dark days.”
—Jean Valentine
“Catherine Barnett’s indelible first book, Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced, has a long fore-life and comes to us as a work of full maturity…. Barnett’s poems are scrupulously restrained and beautifully made, though the speaker in them is at times wild and even crazed with feeling, unappeased by sorrow.”
—Edward Hirsch in The Washington Post
EXCERPT
Living Room Altar
Except for the shirt pulled from the ocean,
except for her hands, which keep folding the shirt,
except for her body, which once held their bodies,
my sister wants everything back now—
If there were a god who could out of empty shells
carried by waves to shore
make amends—
If the ocean saved in a jar
could keep from turning to salt—
She’s hearing things:
bird calling to bird,
cat outside the door,
thorn of the blackberry against the trellis.