For the Boy with the Eyes of the Virgin: Collected Poems

By John Barton
135 pages, $19.95
Published by Nightwood Editions

Reviewed by Julian Gunn

The late-September launch of John Barton’s new collected poems, For the Boy with the Eyes of the Virgin, was so packed that one latecomer had to crawl in behind my seat. I’d just finished browsing the wall of local authors, my favourite part of Cadboro Bay Books. I was sitting down to consume an enormous rum ball when this stranger lay down behind me. I felt suddenly shy and oddly responsible, as though only the uprightness of my posture could prevent this extra person from being flung out into space.

There are two great stops on the Greyhound route of a poet’s published work. (Forgive me – I just got back from a trip up-island.) There’s the Selected Poems and then there’s the Collected Poems. John Barton’s a little young for a Collected, but he’s a major Canadian poet, and For the Boy with the Eyes of the Virgin, his selected poems, is certainly due.

Boy is drawn from nine earlier books and four chapbooks spanning more than thirty years of published work. Barton’s reading explored his career-long commitment to the fearless expression of what we could call a homo-aesthetics, exploring bodies of land, of water, and of flesh. He opened with “Watershed,” from 2001’s Hypothesis, then moved backwards to “Hidden Structure,” an early poem in which the speaker struggles towards an authentic expression of his desire for men.

Between poems, Barton told us he often advises other poets that they “repeat too much.” Yet John himself has a knack for arresting repetition, a kind of imagist insistence on a particular utterance and its echo: “I arrive at the sea. It repeats me / repeats me” (“Hidden Structure”). This gift found a powerful expression in the one new poem Barton read. The poem, a meditation on the circumstances of Omar Khadr, is a variant on the sonnet. The word “know,” initiated in the first line, recurs in each line that follows, beautifully unravelling our confidence in knowing itself.

Some of my favorite Barton poems are in this collection. “Ecology,” from 1994’s Designs from the Interior, is almost an ars poetica for Barton’s particular merging of landscape and eros: “I loved you / with a passion I could not call love, // instead called ecology.”
There is also less sublimated eroticism in Boy. There are stories of pickups, brief affairs, tenuous loves, often wryly described. In “Aide-Memoire” the speaker caustically lists former lovers like self-marketed products. Yet the language of the poems is infinitely tender, so that they seem less like gritty documentary and more like sacred texts. Transcendence constantly threatens to break through. So a poem about a one-night stand, “The Man from Grande Prairie” ends with the admonition that we “must learn / to stop, learn to carry this darkness / toward each other with unblaming hands / of light.” Barton chose not to include any new poems in Boy, so this collection has a kind of finality, but we can expect this dual offering to continue, transmuted into new forms.

Julian Gunn is a Victoria writer of both poetry and personal essays.