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Barbaro: Beyond Brokenness
By Lyn Lifshin
2009; 114pp; Pa; Texas Review Press, English Department, Sam Houston State University, Huntsville TX 77341-2146.$16,95.
The amazing thing about this book is the way Lifshin transforms a
horse named Barbaro into a human being. By the time you get through
reading the book, you are totally inside her psyche, feeling precisely
the way she did about the championship abilities of Barbaro, his
personality and his sad death. A lot of the book deals with Barbaro’s
racing greatness and power, like “The Sparrows Saw Him:”The Sparrows
Saw Him,/saw his hot heart,/walked under/ Maryland maples./The
magolia/leaves moved when he moved, his/glossy mane its own breeze.
He/had a love affair/with speed, could/not wait for the gate to open.,”
p. 15) The main thrust here, though, is decline, illness, the
tremendous sense of loss Barbaro’s death visits on Lifshin herself: “No
one can bear/another horse/in this stall./Stony silence,/cold rising
up,/the stall with its/diamond shaped/opening/Let it rest.” (“Barbaro’s
Birth Stall Empty,” p. 110). She so transforms the death of the horse
into universal grief that her feelings could just as well be applied to
her best friends, family,historical heroes, whoever she is closest to:
“greatness walks/hand to hand/with grief. It’s/the way beauty,
greatness, dissolve,/ are ephemeral,/part of the price,/this
essence/that makes/it so hard/to lose.” (“To Hold On,” p. 112). As
with every other subject she touches, Lifshin’s ability to
universalize, empathize, dramatize, turns her feelings into ours, and
we find yourself totally inside her visions and emotions. The kind of
hard-core interrelating that poetry and all the other arts should be
all about.
Abraços,
Hugh
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