Jacob’s Ladder by Rachel Barton

Sometimes I divide poets into groups. It’s arbitrary, but then it’s also just a way to think about how poems are made. Lately I’ve been entertaining myself with notions about a particular division—poets that look out on the world and those that look inside themselves. Barton’s wonderful Jacob’s Ladder brought me to a third category, for this is a poet that looks inside herself and sees an entire world. As the titular poem of the collection puts it, her voice is singing on the inside.

The subjects of these poems often describe the (deceptively) simple domestic world. They praise, define, and catalog many ordinary and daily pleasures: gardens and food, family and partners, friends and pets. This is a poet who can turn a visit to the post office into a meditation on mortality and the inner life, as in “Possible Evidence of Our Inter Dimensionality,” where the poet stumbles upon some abandoned Carthart work pants and wonders, who knows what slipstream might open—

Along with these themes the forms the poems take often feel diaristic and intimately conversational. Even the shifting between more and less traditional poetic forms in this collection bears it out. There are many prose poems and what reads to me as almost line-broken flash writing. There are even mini-memoirs like “Some of My Best Teachers Were Dogs” and “What We can Bear.” Other poems arrive as numbered lists, and even where no list is specified, we feel the accounting at the heart of Barton’s project. Lists in poems have an effect of being hierarchical, but here we see what matters to Barton is not where things stand in order but where she focuses her eyes and ears.

An example of these innovative list poems is “Permission to Fail.”

1. Uncle Walt wears a bent straw hat to shelter
his crown from noonday sun or evening’s mist.
From the ferry’s railing his song for everyman.

Uncle Walt’s hat is a shelter from the elements, but his song is the opposite, a gesture that opens out to all. This power in music (in poetry) reaches from the shielded individual out to a general, even unknown audience. In the second stanza we see that color also has that power. A single woman can bring forth a color so loud it wakes the neighbors in an homage to Joseph Albers. Albers was a pioneer in color theory, especially interested in what happens when colors are placed next to each other.

Close readings of seemingly simple poems like “Permission to Fail” uncover the network of allusions throughout Jacob’s Ladder. It makes sense, since memory is such a potent theme here. These poems also remember each other. A strong cast of familial characters emphasize this quality of a network—we have Uncle Walt and also the poet’s sisters, mother, father, and husband. The ultimate, intimate family member is, of course, nature itself:

4. You can’t find a chair to sit in. You don’t have
a leg to stand on though you know the heron
owns the creek. You grow restive.

Here’s nature’s domination of the scene in the form of a heron who “owns” this landscape less in the sense of possession than the slang of domination. We are “owned” by our expectations of what we can and cannot control. I love the witty, insightful combination of chair legs, aphorisms, birds and restlessness. Barton raises existential questions among the hats and chair legs. We might always end only on just enough to distract an old donkey from his loneliness.

Who knows what slipstreams might open.

Barton can surprise us, and even when she uses her arsenal of thoughtful and beautiful language, that softness sometimes conceals hard truth—the mulch that sounds so gentle in “After the Rains, Early Summer” is alluded to as a suffocation. Hard truths are not suppressed in this volume. Barton’s visual intelligence and masterful lyricism keeps her on the right side of the sentimental. Music comes to the rescue in lines like slither of a garter snake in “House on Fire,” where Barton’s admission that I break / in two what might be whole disallows easy, misty-eyed solutions. The whole collection is a living testament to Marianne Moore’s famous dictum of poetry as imaginary gardens with real toads in them. Barton’s work is a world of both gardens and their toads.

This is a book for the literal and metaphorical gardener; it’s a paean to our cultivations, wherever they may lead. Many of the poems begin and end in dreams, though they are not prognostic or even analyzable. Rather the dreams sustain the poet, and she can’t live without them any more than the plants in her garden. I’m struck by how important it feels to this collection to name and dedicate. Barton writes to friends and characters such as Jules Verne, Mrs. Dalloway, Martha Steward, the Moss People, fellow poets, and the un-named with the same gentle urgency. She is definitely dedicating this collection to you, her reader, above all.

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Merridawn Duckler is the author of Interstate (dancing girl press), Idiom (Harbor Review), Misspent Youth (rinky dink press), and Arrangement (Southernmost Books). She won the Beulah Rose poetry prize, the CNF prize from Invisible City, the Elizabeth Sloane Tyler Memorial Award from Woven Tale Press (judged by Ann Beattie), and the drama prize from Arts and Letters. She’s a member of Blackfish Gallery in Portland, OR.