Mel Cooke, Freelance Writer
THE GARDEN of Forgetting poems of love and loss, is very well judged by its cover.
That includes not only the title, in which the good 'l' precedes the bad one, but also the striking cover painting, 'Girl With A Teardrop' by Roberta Stoddart. It is a painting of a remarkably placid, even slightly amused, face, save for a single teardrop about to disengage from the left eye.
There is sorrow, but no self-pity.
It is a good face on a 50-poem collection in which, although Barber Wood deals extensively with the extreme pain of loss after deep love, she does not do the literary equivalent of theatric 'bawling out' at funerals.
BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN
And The Garden of Forgetting is so beautifully written that one can get gloriously lost in the language. The beauty comes at a price, though, as we are informed that "at the core of this collection are poems that chart the process of coming to terms with the life-shattering loss of two relationships: father and husband."
At the core of the various locations which the poems cover ('Guyana Season' goes to the far reaches of the Caribbean, 'Remembering Thira' refers to "the crisp, clean blue of the Mediterranean sky") is, naturally, a garden. The collection starts with 'Voices From The Garden of Forgetting', the actual title poem coming six poems from the end.
In 'Voices', Barber Wood describes her father's loss before the loss of her father with:
"... I'd see him hunched at the
edge of the bed, a sleepy shadow
impaled on the thorns of
broken dreams.
Then, one day, with the sweep
of an epic tale he left: the ash remains unclaimed."
TIME BLOOMS AND BENDS
In The Garden of Forgetting itself, Barber Wood seems to celebrate a place where time blooms and bends:
"There is a thirsty road that winds around the mountain's waist and ends in the Garden of Forgetting; there, yesterday, today and tomorrow grows ...
Yesterday, today and tomorrow weeps in the Garden of Forgetting, in fading light."
There is the loss of a child who grew to be near a man:
"I love you to 'finity', you said; you were three ... you disappeared, leaving only the memory, like the pain reflected in stained glass, where innocence promised infinity."
It is not only the obvious loss of death that Barber Wood addresses, as she weaves in the loss of youth (which may be a bit more immediate and universal). So, in 'The Fan Palm', she describes "the warm beads from the powdered provinces of her age" and states in autumn that "the days get shorter after fifty and/endurance wanes ...". Fifty seems central, an age where Barber Wood dubs "the age some people grapple with eternity."
However, the loss of youth is addressed beautifully in 'Old Friend':
"... the sky
like a whitened ash mirroring the passion lost
to her watchful eye. And yet the wicks
of her mouth still curled the way they did
when she beguiled the world!"
Also making its way into the collection are lines about writing. In 'The Verandah', Barber Wood captures the process as "each time I roll words half-way up that hill". In 'Vincent #2', she is alone at her computer before daybreak and "I rewrite the chordless lines until the chorus rises." There is wry humour in the process, too, as Barber Wood addresses writer's block in 'The Blank Screen', saying "I had chosen the lonely road, the dark/of poetry, but that faithless bitch, the muse,/was nowhere to be found."
A SENSE OF CONTINUATION
She makes a rare dip into strictly Jamaican terminology in 'Black Tuesday', with "the shottas sneer as they force a home." And there is a beautiful reference to streetside sound systems in 'Old Strains', with "the hoarse rumble of bass speakers."
Her loss is certainly not terminal (in more than one sense) and there is a sense of continuation in 'A Light Left On':
"Sometimes in your eyes I see him lingering, dark, strikingly handsome ...
These children of another generation,
baptised in a father's sorrow."
The Garden of Forgetting - poems of love and loss is published by the U.K.-based Peepal Tree Press.
