Separate Objects

The idea of a book-as-a-poem guided Dennis Barone's selections for Separate Objects. "You want to follow the railroad tracks like an Indian ear to the track" Barone writes in the poem "Sweet Chariot." The poems contained in this book have been reworked many times. The finished poems right down to the last one--"Drums"--frame the long process of on-going composition, "all that pattern held in just so." This pattern "has been the story of rivers, oceans, and fenders." The poems put as much stress on listening to words as sounding them. "How can I speak, / if within is only silence?" he writes in "The Objects of Our Attention." The epistemological theme running through the book--how do we know and how do we know it--connects with Robert Venturi's notion of the familiar shifted off its axis. "The familiar that is a little off," the architect has said, "has strange and revealing power." The poems in this book have that power: "Out of the silence, / a dinosaur on the page?" Separate Objects is a book that articulates its own form in its speaking. That articulation is full of speculation; it is a struggle that hovers always between meaning and meaninglessness, that hovers where neither is sufficient for an ultimate grounding or a final resting and so it moves. As Barone writes in another poem, "Zonder Zuiker": "The door opened. / The hogs ran outside. / the boys came back. / The big dog had the / little dog in in its mouth. / The dogs came back inside. / The big dog spit the little / dog out. / The little dog could speak."